The project, which is being put out to bid for 3.55 million euros, will provide 169,000 square meters of space for intermodal transportation.
The port’s president, Santiago Rodríguez Vega, is confident that the upcoming construction of the rail spur—which will allow broad-gauge trains to run along the new docks on the right bank of the estuary—will serve as an incentive to attract new traffic or recover other traffic that, such as the thermal coal that Endesa used to import for its Compostillas power plant in León, «migrated» to other ports that supposedly offered better conditions. «This project improves the port’s competitiveness,» the president emphasizes.
Rodríguez Vega, who yesterday chaired the Port Authority’s board meeting where it was agreed to put the railway project—valued at 3.55 million euros—out to bid, emphasized that the rail infrastructure transforms the Valliniello docks—the result of two successive expansions carried out between 2008 and 2014 that cost a total of more than 75 million euros—«into a high-quality port facility.» The president refers to the convergence of four factors that make the port attractive for shipping cargo: a draft of up to 14 meters that allows large ships to dock, one kilometer of berthing line (enough to serve two ships at once), a 169,000-square-meter esplanade available to port operators; and now, the icing on the cake: rail connectivity.
In line with the goal of «intermodality» in transportation advocated by Puertos del Estado, the Avilés docks have for decades offered both broad-gauge and narrow-gauge rail service on the left bank of the estuary (the Raíces area and the San Juan de Nieva dock), but implementing this on the right bank was still pending. According to Rodríguez Vega, this will now be achieved «with a relatively small investment considering the benefits it can bring.».
The importance of having a railroad at the docks is illustrated by the volume of cargo moved by train within the port facilities: 547,421 metric tons in 2012 and 634,373 in 2013, figures that account for 10 percent of the port’s total traffic and that, for the most part, correspond to goods loaded onto ships rather than unloaded from them.
The port president is working with a timeline under which the rail spur connecting the Valliniello docks to the Adif rail network will be operational by the end of this year. In the longer term, Rodríguez Vega does not rule out building the spur line that would take the train to the farthest pier in the Port of Avilés—the one in the Raíces expansion—which the train currently does not reach: «Over time, this is a project that could prove worthwhile.».
