Thieves Are Stripping Catenary and Signalling Off Portugal's €460 Million Évora to Caia Railway, and Certification Is Slipping

Infraestruturas de Portugal (Infrastructure of Portugal) started dynamic testing this month on the new railway between Évora and Elvas, the last stretch before the Spanish border at Caia. It is not going smoothly. The Ministério das Infraestruturas (Ministry of Infrastructure) has told parliament that thefts and acts of vandalism on the finished works are causing added constraints, with consequences for the schedules and the planning of certification activities.

The equipment being taken, according to the reply, is catenary, signalling and telecommunications gear: precisely the systems that have to be installed, commissioned and then certified before a train can run. The ministry, led by Miguel Pinto Luz, also flagged a second bottleneck that has nothing to do with crime. Contracting the accredited bodies that must sign off the line is taking longer than expected, because there are few of them in Portugal.

The answer went to the Livre parliamentary group, which asked in July when trains would enter service on a line declared finished in January that still has no opening date. The reply was reported on Wednesday by Jornal de Negócios.

A line that has been almost ready for eight months

The new Évora line is a roughly 100-kilometre project, about 90 kilometres of it newly built, running from Évora through Évora Norte and Elvas to the Caia frontier. It belongs to the Corredor Internacional Sul (Southern International Corridor) within the Trans-European Transport Network, and its purpose is freight: the alignment is built to take 750-metre goods trains between the port of Sines and the Spanish network. Public investment is put at about 460 million euros, and the works were carried out by a consortium of Somafel, Teixeira Duarte and Mota-Engil.

When Pinto Luz visited in January he said the civil works were done: Portugal had the largest substation feeding railway catenary in the country operational, and track and catenary were complete. What remained was electronic signalling and telecommunications, then homologation and certification, which he estimated at about a year. Trains, he said, would run at the end of 2026 or the beginning of 2027. Infraestruturas de Portugal had not then filed the entry-into-service authorisation with the Instituto da Mobilidade e dos Transportes (Institute for Mobility and Transport). Público reported the project was carrying six years of delay.

Why the theft matters more than it sounds

An unopened line is close to an open invitation: kilometres of newly strung catenary, no traffic, no staff on the ground, and the security posture of a construction site rather than an operating railway. The damage is not only replacement cost. Certification tests a system as installed, so stripping a section of signalling cable means the certifier cannot verify what was there and the sequence restarts.

The commercial stakes are real. Évora to Caia is the missing piece in a corridor Portugal has spent years assembling to move containers off lorries and onto rail between Sines and central Europe. That corridor also depends on the Poceirão to Bombel rebuild awarded to Zagope in July, and on the 468 million euro logistics and rail-freight park approved for Grândola. Each link is worth less until the border crossing opens.

What this means for readers

• If you live in the Alentejo: there is still no date. The government's own answer describes a certification process being pushed back rather than a schedule being met.
• If you were expecting a passenger service: the line is designed principally for freight. Passenger connections to the Spanish network are a stated aim, not a timetabled one.
• If you follow the Sines logistics story: the port's rail capacity to Europe stays capped until Caia opens, whatever else gets built.
• If you watch public works generally: the shortage of accredited certification bodies is a structural constraint that will hit other rail projects too.

Until Infraestruturas de Portugal files with the IMT and the accredited bodies finish, the 460 million euro railway remains a completed line with no trains on it. The same pressure to get more out of the existing network sits behind the Competition Authority's recent call to open Portugal's railways to rival operators.