The Minister of Economy has reaffirmed at the University of Aveiro the Government´s commit in betting in a merchandize trail between the Port of Aveiro and Spain. Álvaro Santos Pereira has explained the importance of the project while taking place and the closure of the conference "Learning to grow with the crisis" that occurred last Tuesday.

The railroad connexion is one of the listed ways by the governor for the country to reinforce its export capacity.

"Government´s intention is exactly the creation of a merchandize trail from the Port of Aveiro connecting then Salamanca to Irun. The other one already considered in this community support outline which goes from Sines, Lisboa, also up north until Irun. Why is this important? Sometimes people don´t really get the importance in betting in a merchandize train track. It is very simple. In the XIX century Portugal and Spain decided to go through a different path from Europe.  It was the size of the train tracks, which is called "bitola", and has a different size from the rest of Europe.

What´s happening is that the trains that go from Portugal and Spain to the rest of Europe arrive to the border of Spain and Portugal and have to stop to change the "bitola". well, the merchandize have to be transvasadas and it is time and money lost making our merchandize more expensive. This is why we have insisted a lot for the need of having European gage tracks which allow our enterprises of going out of the Port of Aveiro or Sines or from other parts of the country and being connected to Europe in order to be more competitive", explained the governor.

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