With the aim of speeding up the construction of the Mexico-Toluca Train and ensuring that the work is completed in the second half of 2023, the Secretariat of Infrastructure, Communications and Transportation (SICT) announced yesterday that it will grant an additional 350 million pesos to the city government. of Mexico to allocate them this year for that purpose.
Last March, the agency announced that as part of a resource reallocation agreement it would deliver 950 million pesos to continue in 2022 with construction work on section 3, from Cerro de las Cruces to the Observatorio terminal station.
With the additional resources, the total amount that can be invested this year is 1,300 million pesos.
These economic resources are considered within the 7,000 million pesos that this year were assigned to the project in the expenditure budget, which, to date, are flowing in a trickle, since at the end of the first quarter they had barely been used. 9.1 million pesos.
In addition to few resources, there are last-minute changes (such as the new Vasco de Quiroga station that will allow connection to the fourth and new section of Chapultepec Forest) that have delayed its completion.
Originally, the Mexico-Toluca train should have been completed in 2017 because the executive project that allowed construction to begin was ready three years earlier.
To date, among the great pending is having all the rights of way (the current progress is 99.2%) and the total amount of investment has been updated, so there are figures that do not coincide: for the Secretariat Treasury and Public Credit (SHCP) is 103,615.1 million pesos, although recent information from the SICT sets it at 90,000 million pesos.
The construction of the passenger train that will run along an extension of 57.9 km of double electrified railway, with 4.7 km of tunnel, seven stations: two terminals (Zinacantepec and Observatory) and five intermediate ones (Pino Suárez, Tecnológico, Lerma, Vasco de Quiroga and Santa Fe), according to the SICT, has a total progress of civil works of 78%, in the progress of the electromechanical work 61% and the financial progress is around 77 percent.
Additional works
As an argument to allocate more resources to the local government that is in charge of section 3, it was reported: in order to expedite and guarantee the continuity of the works of the Toluca-Valle de México interurban passenger train project, through official letter 4.3.475/ 2022 dated March 25, 2022, the SICT requested the General Directorate of Programming, Organization and Budget of the same secretariat to, through it, manage before the SHCP the granting of a liquid increase in the amount of 350 million pesos for the current fiscal year, which has already been authorized.
So that the resources are not used for other purposes, the authority of Mexico City “will be in charge of all those obligations related to the execution, verification and protection of the project documentation, while the Secretariat of Administration and Finance will attend exclusively to those obligations related to the reception and administration of the resources transferred by the Federation, in terms of the provisions of article 69 of the General Government Accounting Law”.
In addition to adding a budget, new construction tasks were added to the agreement between the parties, among them: continue with the execution of the works corresponding to the construction of the architecture, urbanization and electromechanical installations of the Santa Fe station, as well as the construction of the pedestrian walkway 1 access building B; begin with the execution of the works corresponding to the construction of the architecture, urbanization and electromechanical installations of the Observatory terminal station and continue with the construction of the special Observatory viaduct (located on the work front called Calle Minas de Arena).
