The incorporation of train drivers and five new trains this year will make it possible to extend timetables and frequencies.
Councillor Vidal and the heads of Mobilitat and SFM welcome the new train drivers.
Mallorca’s Railway Services (SFM) has already qualified 13 new train drivers who joined the company last March, which means that they have already passed the theoretical and practical training period and can work as the rest of the train drivers that make up the staff. The 13 newly qualified train drivers have already begun to drive during business hours, both on the train and metro services.
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SFM’s new train drivers begin their service
The Councillor for Housing, Territory and Mobility, Marta Vidal, accompanied by the Director General for Mobility, Lorena del Valle, and the SFM manager, José Ramón Orta, visited the new drivers this morning at the Intermodal Station and “officially” welcomed them to the service, stressing the importance of these new recruits to guarantee the possibility of extending both the timetables and the frequency of the service.
Through this process, as reported at the end of March, SFM has taken on 17 new employees, including 14 train drivers, two administrative staff and one traffic factor (technician in charge of railway traffic control). Although it has not been possible to fill all the positions offered in the process, the workforce will now have a number of train drivers that will allow for service improvements. In addition, SFM expects to be able to publish a new public employment offer before the end of the year, the process of which would take place during 2025.
Together with the arrival of the 5 new quadruple trains, the incorporation of new train drivers will make it possible to extend timetables and increase frequencies, to meet the constant increase in demand that has been recorded in recent years. SFM exceeded one million passengers in a month for the first time last May, when a total of 1,016,098 passengers (808,497 train passengers and 207,601 metro passengers) were counted, a record in the history of the railway company.
The number of users continues to rise this year, in between January and May, SFM has reached almost 4.6 million passengers (4,590,693), which means an increase of almost 14% and more than half a million users compared to the same period in 2023, when the overall number of passengers was 4,037,867 people, in a comparison between two periods in which free public transport is in force.
With respect to the new trains acquired, the first two arrived in Palma at the end of February and April respectively, and are about to complete the technical testing period, and the company expects to receive them this week. This means that the manufacturer is delivering the units with all the guarantees and SFM can begin what is known as the “blank run”, when the units begin to operate like any other train, but without passengers. Once this period, which lasts around one month, is over, they will be ready to enter commercial service.