The low-cost high-speed train company, Ouigo, will offer the first trips between Elche and Madrid in May of next year.
Spanish railway infrastructure manager, Adif, has provisionally authorised the French company and its provincial expansion plans to provide service on the Madrid-Elche-Murcia line from 2024 and the scheduled date is during the month of May.
From now on, Ouigo will begin the homologation tests of the trains, a process that takes time, as sources at Adif have pointed out.
To do this, it plans to offer more than 14,000 weekly spaces with two frequencies a day (two ’round trips’, to be exact) between Madrid and Elche in 2 hours and 20 minutes, without going through Alicante, according to the general director of Ouigo in Spain, Hélène Valenzuela.
Tickets will be priced at 5 euro for children under 14 years of age (free for children under 3 years of age) and from 9 euro for adults. These plans now have provisional permission from Adif. Regarding the links with Elche and Murcia, Valenzuela already asserted that they were technically “affordable”, and that she believed that the market was going to “work”.
The company has also requested to operate on the Segovia-Valladolid line, although it is awaiting Adif’s decision.
