The Minister of Transport and Sustainable Mobility, Óscar Puente, presented the new Cercanías 453 series this morning at Madrid’s Príncipe Pío station.
Accompanied by Renfe’s chairman, Álvaro Fernández Heredia; the Government Delegate in Madrid, Francisco Martín Aguirre; and Stadler Valencia’s chairman, Íñigo Parra, the event took place inside unit 453-602, which debuts the new livery we revealed last Friday.
The new generation of Cercanías trains began passenger service on Monday 24 August and is the first Cercanías series to enter service since 2003.
During his remarks, which we streamed live on social media, Óscar Puente stressed that the 200 m units are the highest-capacity Cercanías trains in Spain in a single formation. With 1,884 seats, they are also among the highest-capacity commuter trains in the world.
Addressing complaints that the trains are being allocated to Madrid, Puente noted that the capital’s Cercanías hub accounts for 50% of all Renfe passengers. According to the minister, line C-5 alone concentrates 16% of national demand. For this reason, it requires trains with maximum capacity to make the most of every path on a network suffering from saturation, particularly due to the bottleneck created by the Atocha–Chamartín tunnels.
The minister reiterated the need to renew rolling stock more steadily rather than making large one-off investments. The last Civia trains, designed and launched under Francisco Álvarez-Cascos as Minister of Public Works, finished production in 2010.
Following the speech in the leading car, attendees toured the interior of the train to inspect all its features.
Although the formation debuted the new livery, dominated by red, nothing was said about a change in corporate identity. Even if such a rebrand is under way, a company worker argues that the priority is to get the trains into service to improve operations.
Nevertheless, observers could note the darkening of the Cercanías red, the retention of the “C” logo that some thought lost, and the decoration based on circles and lozenges in red that, in Morse code, spells RENFE.