CEF support to Mediterranean Corridor - April 2018

CEF Transport projects by country

Overview

The Mediterranean Corridor is the main east-west axis in the TEN-T Network south of the Alps. It runs between the south-western Mediterranean region of Spain and the Ukrainian border with Hungary, following the coastlines of Spain and France and crossing the Alps towards the east through Italy, Slovenia and Croatia and continuing through Hungary up to its eastern border with Ukraine. The corridor primarily consists of road and rail, aside from the Po River, several canals in Northern Italy and the Rhone River from Lyon to Marseille. The corridor is approximately 3000 km long; it will provide a multimodal link for the ports of the Western Mediterranean with the center of the EU. It will also create an east-west link through the southern part of the EU, contribute to a modal shift from road to rail in sensitive areas such as the Pyrenees and the Alps, and connect some of the major urban areas of the EU with high-speed trains. 

Main bottlenecks and missing links

The key section of the corridor is the new cross-border rail link between France and Italy (Lyon-Turin). In addition, the cross-border links with Slovenia, Croatia and Hungary need to be taken into account. Multimodal connections with ports in Spain and France have to be developed and some railway sections in Italy and France need to be upgraded in order to remove key bottlenecks. The coexistence of two gauges (1668 mm in Spain and 1435mm in the other countries) is another challenge for this corridor, as is the full integration of the newest Member State, Croatia. 

Success stories

The 621 km Madrid-Barcelona high-speed line, opened in February 2008, has seen millions of passengers move from air and road to rail due to the reduction of journey times between the two cities from 5 hrs to 2 hrs 38 mins. This line was extended towards France via the Perpignan-Figueras cross-border tunnel and links Spain to the trans-European high-speed network. High-speed passenger services between Barcelona and Paris started in December 2013.

CEF: Pre-identified projects