Innovations and Reforms to Be Introduced for the Modernization of the Conventional Railway Line of Madrid-Cuenca-Valencia

Abstract

This political study unravels the results and derivations of the potential official interest in closing the conventional train line between Madrid and Valencia, showing in all sections that it is urgent to ensure that a mistake is not made with wide consequences. This requires completely discarding the so-called “XCuenca Plan”, since it would generate a problem that has been dragging on for many years and that has only been getting worse over time. The general objective is focused on claiming support for the train and the maintenance of the line, as the backbone and dynamizer of the province of Cuenca. This opinion has been achieved through the most common methods of information extraction in Sociology in the field of local management, focusing on those areas in which it is necessary to have a diagnostic knowledge of the reality on which it is intended to act. With concrete data it is shown that there is a better alternative to this plan to structure the localities of the provinces of Cuenca, Toledo, Madrid and Valencia, in terms of travel time and price. And a new strategy, elaborated by Pablo Salvador Zuriaga, a PhD professor at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, reveals that the solution to this problem must be based on rail-road intermodality and its application to the localities of the Serranía Baja de Cuenca. The strategy is based on improving the benefits that the improved line would introduce and its operation with updated rolling stock, but it goes further. Once the line is renewed, the objective is to carry out a public consultation with the municipalities under the area of influence of the line to agree on the service schedules. From there, solutions must be articulated to move travelers from the population centers to the nearest stations. We will see that this solution, even considering the transfer times, is more efficient than assigning a bus that passes through the successive population centers.