Four months ago, Joaquim Hortalà left Renfe due to disagreements with its management. Today he returns to the railway through the front door, as president of Adif. His former boss at Renfe, Álvaro Fernández Heredia, has just been dismissed and his position will be occupied by Inmaculada Gutiérrez Carrizo, until now a director of the operator. It is the revolution with which Carlos Corpo wants to turn the page on Óscar Puente's era and regain confidence in a railway shaken by accidents, labor tensions and an internal crisis that threatens to continue.
The first vice president of the Government, who inherited the management of the railway crisis just 10 days ago, after Puente's resignation, is listening to some unions that had been asking for some time to cleanse the leadership of public railway companies of political influence and who are pressuring him from the streets to act now with strikes and protests.
In this break with the inheritance of former Minister Puente, the first to leave was his Chief of Staff, Encarnación Sandonis, who was replaced by the State economist Jorge Fabra. Then it was the turn of the presidencies of Adif and Renfe, both occupied by two people of Puente's greatest confidence. The three profiles that have replaced them share a common denominator: all three are career civil servants, with experience in public management and outside the circle of trust closest to the former minister.
The Corps' commitment does not involve placing engineers in charge of the railway. Neither Hortalà nor Gutiérrez are specialists in railway operation. Their profiles are fundamentally legal, economic and regulatory. Corps seeks with them a less political and more professional management, capable of recovering relations with staff who have been reporting security problems, lack of personnel and work overload for months.
The case of Hortalà is especially significant. State Attorney since 2004, he knows well the offices of the Administration and regulatory bodies. He was secretary of the Council of the National Competition Commission, director of the Legal Department of the CNMC and later secretary of its Council. He also directed the legal services of the FROB before joining Renfe in 2024.
His departure from the operator, announced in June and effective in July, was officially attributed to personal reasons, although different media, including EL MUNDO, then reported discrepancies with the team of the now outgoing Fernández Heredia.
The latter said goodbye to Renfe yesterday with a letter to the staff and a long thread in X reviewing his work at the head of the operator. In his writing he assumed "fully and personally the responsibility for not having known how to avoid the current situation." The former president acknowledged that they had been "difficult" months and that the succession of events had not always allowed the planned improvements to be promoted at the desired pace. However, he wanted to distinguish his personal responsibility from that of the company and promised the workers to fight "any attempt to interpret" his dismissal as an acknowledgment of responsibility on the part of Renfe, which, as he defended, "has always been a loser" and has struggled daily to provide the best possible service.
Fernández Heredia thus closes a period of less than two years marked by the tragedies of Adamuz and Urda and by a deterioration in labor relations that has ended up overwhelming management. In his farewell, he vindicated the work of the team and said he had always felt surrounded by "a great team committed to reversing adversity." He also left a message to his workers: "I can't help but ask you to continue taking care of each other the way you do."
Body's bet to replace him is Inmaculada Gutiérrez Carrizo. He belongs to the Higher Corps of Commercial Technicians and State Economists, the same as the vice president, and has developed a good part of his career between the Administration, competition organizations and business activity. She was economic and commercial advisor of Spain in the United States and, more recently, general director of Renfe Proyectos Internacional.
Its regulatory experience could be valuable for a Renfe that no longer enjoys a high-speed monopoly and must compete with Iryo and Ouigo. But its most immediate challenge will not be in competition, but in regaining the trust of the train drivers and resolving the operational problems that have led the company to a situation of enormous internal tension.
The dimension of the challenge was evident on the same Friday of the appointments. The train drivers' union Semaf recognized "technical progress" in the negotiations with Transport, but warned that there were still "essential issues" to be resolved, which is why it maintains the mobilizations planned for November 17 and 23. The train drivers demand ten pending measures, including reinforcing high-speed protection systems, establishing protocols for incidents in the LZB, reviewing the maximum work times of controllers and implementing cross-validation mechanisms.
The discomfort is not limited to the train drivers either. The CGT union directly demands a State pact for the railway from Corpus because it considers that the crisis cannot be resolved "by isolated groups, nor by companies, nor through partial agreements." The union demands ten-year planning, sustained investments, measures to reduce the physical and mental overload of the workforce and study greater integration between Adif and Renfe.
The first truce came precisely yesterday. After a new week of chaos in Rodalies, with dozens of trains canceled daily due to the lack of availability of drivers, Renfe and the majority of the Barcelona works council reached an agreement on Friday to recover the shifts prior to November 2. The pact, supported by Semaf, UGT and CCOO, provides for a transition day this Saturday and its effective application starting tomorrow, Sunday, when it is expected to recover normality prior to the conflict.
The agreement comes after the strict application of regulatory shifts forced train drivers to start and end their days in Sants, instead of using other reference stations previously agreed with the company. The measure had helped trigger a cascade of deletions that reached at least 68 trains on Friday alone. Semaf attributes the collapse to Renfe's inability to provide the service without the flexibility that workers usually provide.
The Catalan detente represents a first relief for the new leadership, although the pact was reached before the dismissal of Fernández Heredia. But it does not deactivate national mobilizations either. The replacement of the leadership at Adif and Renfe alleviates, but does not resolve, the majority of the workforce's labor demands and does leave the security and work organization complaints pending.
