The Government of Mexico prepares seven tenders for the rehabilitation and adaptation of railroad tracks that will be used for the Maya Train project, one of the main infrastructures promoted by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. The project is planned to be completed by the year 2023, according to the statements made by the director of the National Fund for Tourism Promotion (Fonatur), Rogelio Jiménez Pons.
At a press conference in Merida, Yucatan, Jimenez Pons urged to accelerate the works, that will encompass 1,500 kilometers across five states: Quintana Roo, Tabasco, Campeche, Chiapas and Yucatan.
The tenders will be conducted in two stages. In a first stage, this year, four tenders will be launched to connect different sections from Palenque, Chiapas, to Mérida, Yucatán.
The second stage of public tenders will connect points from Mérida to Izamal, Valladolid and Chichén Itzá, also within the state of Yucatán, to finally reach Cancún, in the state of Quintana Roo.
Jiménez Pons explained that in the Yucatan area and on the route from Palenque to Valladolid, the railway tracks that already exist will be “rehabilitated”. Since the railroad there is currently in disuse and its conditions need to be radically improved for the Maya Train project.
He also added that they do not foresee underground stretches, among other things due to the type of terrain of the Yucatan Peninsula.
The decisions will be taken under the supervision of specialists from the Institute of Geophysics of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), headed by scientist Jaime Urrutia Fucugauchi.
For the second part of the route, the tender will be launched in 2020, and the reailway will have to be built from Cancun, all the way down to the municipality of Bacalar, in the south of the state.
The Maya Train will have an investment of about 150 billion pesos.
The train will seek to concretize decades of attempts by other governments to detonate growth in southern Mexico, a well of natural resources and a source of foreign exchange, but also of inequality and poverty.
TYT Newsroom with information from yucatan.com.mx
