When at the end of last week it emerged that the Pedro Sánchez government had bought 31 trains for the Cantabria and Asturias regional network and that when they received the plans they found that they did not fit through the tunnels, because they were too big, my first thought was that it must be an exaggeration. What minister would authorize a purchase like this without first checking the clearance of the tunnels that they had to pass through? Yes, indeed. The Spanish minister of transport, mobility and urban agency - the name of the position says it all - Raquel Sánchez, former mayor of Gavà, has said that there will be imminent layoffs due to the disaster, although I suppose it will be from this Monday because they can't have been working over the weekend.
The contract for these oversized trains is in excess of 258 million euros and they now await to see if the manufacturer is in a position to provide new wagons, although the ministry simply responds that the sooner they can, the better. Really, as the president of Cantabria commented, it resembles a Luis Berlanga film, because the order must have passed through many offices, numerous meetings must have been held and something as elementary as the study of the route they had to traverse was either not performed or incorrectly drafted.
We'll see what happens in the coming days and what explanations are given, but given the eagerness shown in trying to prove that in some actions of the Catalan governments under Mas or Puigdemont there was misuse of public funds, I do not want to speculate on the correct response to the frustrated purchase of 258 million euros worth of trains that are not useful for anything except exhibiting in a museum. But of course, it must be that in Spain you get rewarded for screwing things up and the state is very comfortable with that old motto, "Spain is different".
In 2016, the most modern submarine in the Armada sank due to excess weight of between 70 and 100 tons. It was valued at more than 500 million euros. Fixing it took almost two years and a new allocation from the budget. When the problem of the first prototype was finally solved, a new setback arose: it did not fit in its base at the navy dock in Cartagena, because the extra ten metres of length made it impossible. Another 10 million euros had to be invested. It's not surprising that budgets always have significant overruns when it comes to public works. There are things that, no matter how much they are explained, are inexplicable. And, also, unacceptable.