Will the 4T (Terminating Power) bring any karma with the rail projects? The Maya Train seems like a bottomless pit, the Suburban Railway (AIFA) is being held up by landowners in the State of Mexico, and now a local group wants to challenge the federal project for the location of the terminal station for the Mexico City-Querétaro Train.
The project has sparked an intense local controversy that is just beginning to surface in the media, pitting logistics planning against real estate interests.
According to legislative sources related to the communications and infrastructure sectors, the issue will be debated “and will be resolved in the coming days” within the team of Adrián Lajous, who heads the Railway Transport Regulatory Agency (ARTF). The groups seeking to profit from the terminal’s removal from downtown Querétaro will have to come to terms with this, the sources warn.
The old train terminal, located in the area known as Alcanfores, is the option originally chosen by the ARTF (Argentine National Railway), headed by Adrián Lajous, but local business and political groups are promoting the land of Military Camp No. 17 as an alternative.
In most cities, trains arrive in downtown areas, especially if they are passenger trains! To avoid going so far, consider the Buenavista-Lechería Suburban Train. Can you imagine if the terminal station were sent to Naucalpan?
Stakeholders are pushing for solutions that experts have considered complex, costly, and unfeasible, as they would involve additional works such as overpasses and crossings of properties, and private companies are pushing to move the terminal to land near their properties, in order to increase the value of their properties and their projects.
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The intention of this group of local politicians and businesspeople is to build the terminal in the Military Zone, incorporating that area into the city of Querétaro through a development from scratch.
The drawback is that this would require a series of costly renovations. The cost of just one of the overpasses is estimated at several billion pesos. Furthermore, the Cargo Terminal—known as “Querétaro’s customs house” because it once housed a fiscal enclosure—would be affected, which would entail even more movements, renovations, and construction work.
But then, why the insistence? The interest group’s intention is, on the one hand, to increase the value of the land surrounding the Military Zone, which, coincidentally, is their property. And second, to enter the “re-purchase” of construction contracts.
For this reason, they have launched a campaign to question the transit of trucks on the road to the Cargo Terminal, seeking to discredit the movement of goods on a highway that was originally federal, built in the 1940s to serve the military zone and, at the time, the state-owned Almacenes Nacionales de Depósito (ANDSA), long before the emergence of subdivisions like Las Teresas, developed without their own connectivity.
BACKGROUND
We are told that since 1943, with the arrival of the first industries at the exit to San Miguel de Allende, Querétaro took on an industrial vocation. In 1964, the Federal Government acquired land next to the 17th Military Zone and the railroad tracks to establish ANDSA warehouses and a federal freight road (current San Juan Avenue), which became the basis for the area’s logistical and industrial development.
With the establishment of companies like Kellogg’s and micro-industrial parks, this productive hub was consolidated. After the signing of NAFTA in 1994, growing logistics needs led to the creation of the first private Inland Intermodal Cargo Terminal in Mexico, through the disincorporation and conversion of the ANDSA facilities, taking advantage of its excellent rail and road connectivity.
Faced with uncontrolled urban growth, the Urban Development Plan was formulated in 1996, which classified the cargo terminal as Transportation Equipment (TE) and included roadways to streamline urban traffic. However, these projects were never built.
Today, the need to complete this road infrastructure, planned more than two decades ago, remains pending to regulate transportation flows and maintain Querétaro as a logistics and productive hub of national importance.
Source: emeequis
