After signing today the initial grant from the City Council of €600,000, a ‘one-off, fixed’ amount that will be provided within a maximum of six months, a project will be launched in three weeks to attract private investment to the rail link with Valencia.

Source: El Diario de Burgos

This morning, Burgos City Council signed a collaboration agreement with Logística Multimodal Castilla y León involving a €600,000 subsidy to promote the multi-client train service between the dry port of Villafría and the seaport of Valencia. Mayor Cristina Ayala explained that this amount will be ‘fixed and one-off’ and will be delivered within a maximum period of six months, with a commitment to a minimum of two weekly return trips. Juan Carlos Martín, director of the Burgos Customs Transport Centre (CTBurgos) and Logística Multimodal Castilla y León, announced that within ‘two or three weeks’ he will launch a project to enable Burgos-based companies to join the initiative and cover the costs once the municipal aid has ended. ‘When a train starts operating, it has a knock-on effect; having it available on a regular basis gives exporters and importers greater confidence,’ he reflected.

The aim, Ayala continued, is to ‘reduce heavy goods vehicle traffic on the roads and thereby advance sustainability and promote intermodal transport for what our industry manufactures’. This is a ‘pilot plan to help promote the service, so that companies know it is available and start using it’. Ayala also took the opportunity to call on the central government to provide a direct Madrid-Aranda-Burgos train service, assuring that it is ‘profitable logistics’.

The agreement was signed after a modification of the budgets and the correction of an initial error in the last plenary session, in which CTBurgos appeared as a collaborator instead of Logística Multimodal Castilla y León, although the mayor pointed out that ‘the manager is the same, the figure is exactly the same’. The railway project began operating in July towards the capital of Turia, promoted by the local company Asercomex in collaboration with CTBurgos and operated by Low Cost Rail. In the assessment of the first months of operation, Martín highlighted the success of imports. ‘We understood that at the beginning the most complex thing was going to be imports, because Burgos is obviously an exporter, but it has worked very well,’ he explained. ‘What we have to achieve now is that balance and that success with exports,’ he added. He also announced that ‘sustained growth’ would be considered in order to consolidate the three weekly frequencies, something that was already done on a provisional basis in August after other train routes were cut due to the fires that ravaged the country.