QCOSTARICA — Nearly 16,000 people use the train service every day to get to work or home, in order to save time and avoid traffic jams. However, these trips are perilous, since 70% of the railroads require intervention.
This is the word from Álvaro Bermúdez, executive president of the Instituto Costarricense de Ferrocarriles (Incofer) – Costa Rica’s national railway service, at the Annual Congress of the Latin American Metro and Subway Association.
“We have 64 kilometers of operations, connecting Cartago, San José, Heredia, and Alajuela, the four cities with the highest population density in the country. These tracks are very old, because we live off the systems that were implemented more than 100 years ago,” said Bermúdez.
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As a result of this, the Incofer executive president explained that investing in new railroads is not feasible “because the current ones obviously affect the operation of any new train that is going to be purchased.”
This situation mainly affects the thousands of users who use this public transport daily, since derailments, crashes or delays are part of daily life.
“Today, the service is provided according to institutional capacities, not putting the user at the center, but with what the institution can offer,” he said.
The railway’s financial situation is not the best, according to the executive president, who told the audience that the outdated tracks respond to “the institutional financial capacities that the institution has to provide the service. We have to replace them all and generate new ones, it is not only about buying trains, but also about changing the tracks.”
Regarding this situation, Guillermo Carazo, executive director of the Federated College of Engineers and Architects, said that if the train service is not promptly intervened, more costs could be generated for the country.
“If we do not invest in track maintenance and we delay it, fixing it in one or two years will be more expensive than now,” he commented.
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He also pointed out that the national railway service is far from having the quality of that of the first world, due to the abandonment of the institution and the lack of diversification of public transport.
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