Body fails to deactivate the train drivers' strike after cutting off Adif and summons them again tomorrow

The vice president and since yesterday Minister of Transport, Carlos Body, is working hard to tackle the crisis opened by the Urda (Toledo) railway tragedy last week. On his first day after the resignation of Óscar Puente, he beheaded the leadership of the public infrastructure company Adif.

In the second, he has tried without success to convince railway workers that the Government takes seriously their repeated warnings about the deterioration of the system so that they deactivate their protests, scheduled for the central weeks of November, in the middle of the electoral campaign.

Corps met this Thursday afternoon with the union representatives of the machinists, whom Puente pointed out in his farewell speech as ungrateful for not having reciprocated the concessions he made to them during his mandate. The drivers, grouped in the Semaf union, have called for strikes on November 10 and 12 in protest against the poor safety conditions presented by the system and for which Adif is responsible.

After the meeting, the Corps has not been able to deactivate these strikes. And he has summoned the representatives again for this Friday. This is "a first contact" with the unions in the sector, with which Corps plans to maintain "a fluid relationship", according to sources from the Ministry of Transport.

The crisis opened by the tragedies of Adamuz (Córdoba), Gelida (Barcelona) and Urda (Toledo), with 116 deaths in nine months, has collapsed confidence in the safety of the railway system. The public manager's own internal documents also confirm that turning the situation around will be more difficult than it may seem and will take years. As this newspaper reports today, based on the financing agreement signed with the Ministry of Finance until 2030, reliability will not take off either on conventional roads or on high speed roads. Operators such as Renfe, Iryo or Ouigo have criticized the "normalization" of this deterioration.

But the train drivers are not the only group up in arms over this situation. Adif has almost 14,000 workers and the unrest, evident since last February, broke out after Urda. CCOO practically requested the urgent intervention of Adif because its actions posed a "serious risk." The body he addressed, the State Railway Safety Agency (AESF), has regulatory powers to modify how the company orders traffic. The AESF has already responded to this demand by citing Adif and the travel companies "to specify the drafting of a guide sheet that contemplates the action to circulate under the protection of the BSL when anomalies occur in circulation with LZB." That is, the infrastructure manager will modify its operations at the request of workers and operators to travel at a mandatory 40 km/h when there is a failure of the signaling system, as happened in last week's tragedy.