It’s an old sea serpent, but it’s rising again. Spain intends to reconsider a railway tunnel project under the Mediterranean to link Gibraltar with Morocco, according to the newspaper the diary.
The State budget for 2023 foresees an allocation of 750,000 euros for a feasibility study entrusted to a public company responsible for this project. Objective: to take “the final step” to be “in a position to start the process.”
It is therefore a question of relaunching (or updating) a 40-year-old project and evoked again in 2007 with a joint plan that had not withstood the financial crisis of 2008. This project foresaw a 42-kilometre route between the North and South terminals to link the two continents in just over half an hour.
The idea will be to integrate the technical advances accumulated in recent years, particularly on the side of the tunnel boring machines.
42 kilometers in 30 minutes
The head of SEGECSA (the Spanish state-owned company in charge of the project) traveled to Germany to meet with representatives of the Herrenknecht company, a world leader in the tunnel boring machine market, in order to analyze the technology that could best adapt to tunnel excavation scan to start the job.
According to the state company, “very favorable prospects are opening up given the evolution of the technical capacities of this type of drilling and excavation systems, and the most recent experiences in the construction of deep tunnels in the subsoil-sea.” .
The initially chosen route should also be modified, according to the Spanish press, in particular the location of the Iberian terminal towards the San Roque-Los Barrios area “to integrate it into the corresponding railway corridor of the European transport network”, which “implies extend the tunnel several kilometers from the place currently disconnected” planned in Tarifa.
The project would consist of the construction of a tunnel through the seabed in the area where the Atlantic Ocean meets the Alboran Sea (Mediterranean), in the style of the English Channel Tunnel that joins France and the United Kingdom.
On the Moroccan side, a public company was also created in 2007 to work on the issue in close collaboration with its Spanish counterpart. But to date, the kingdom of Cherifian has not communicated about this relaunch of reflections. It must be said that the cost of such a project is colossal. Not to mention the troubled diplomatic relations between the two countries…
According to data from the first project, the goal was to transport 9.6 million passengers in 2030 and 7.4 million tons of goods.
Source: BFM TV
