The return of high-speed trains between Spain and the south of France is a little closer to being a reality. Renfe has already opened a branch in Lyon and registered with France’s commercial register, a bureaucratic procedure essential to start commercial activity in the neighboring country after the break with the French company SNCF which ended the joint venture in December last year. Since then, the French public operator has two daily trains between Barcelona and Paris, while Renfe does not go beyond Figueres.
“We are following all the necessary steps to operate in France and the following procedures will be carried out imminently”, announced the president of Renfe, Raül Blanco, during his participation in the Present and Future of Mobility conference, organized by La Vanguardia at the Monteverdi club in Madrid. The next milestone is none other than the start of the sale of tickets for the Barcelona-Lyon and Madrid-Marseille route (with stops at Camp de Tarragona, Barcelona, ??Girona and Figueres).
The trains have been running on tests for half a year and Renfe’s intention was to open them to travelers before the summer, but they are already running late to do so. A week from the official start of the leisure travel season par excellence and with all the companies deploying their offer for some time, tickets to France are not yet for sale on the Renfe website . Sources from the company specify that it will be throughout the summer, without specifying more, when the first passengers will board the two routes, which will initially be offered on alternate days and will later become daily. In all cases, Alstom’s S-100 series high-speed trains will provide a commercial service directed from the operations management center in Barcelona.
The fact is that Renfe’s return to France is following a tortuous path. Although the company has the safety certificate from the French Railway Safety Authority (EPSF) since December 22 for this particular line, they have not made things easy for them in the process of qualifying the train drivers in the French railway sections.
Even less to go further. If Lyon and Marseille were expected in the summer, Paris was planned for the end of the year, but Blanco did not make any reference to it yesterday. The prospects for the recovery of the route between Barcelona and the French capital are not at all encouraging. The demonstration of this pessimism is that Renfe has chosen to open the branch next to Lyon Part Dieu station instead of Paris, as was initially planned when the Ministry of Finance gave the go-ahead to do so . However, Blanco’s ambition remains intact and describes the creation of the branch as “a decisive step to establish itself in the French market in the long term”. In fact, the French branch of Renfe has been registered in the commercial register with the aim of providing passenger rail transport services “both nationally and internationally”. It thus aspires to enter the country with strength when the French Government carries out the liberalization process just as SNCF did with its low-cost subsidiary Ouigo in Spain, where it has had many more facilities.
The progress on trains in France was not the only step forward in terms of infrastructure announced yesterday at the day on mobility organized by this newspaper, which was attended by the CEO of Vueling, Marco Sansavini, and the president of Aena , Maurici Lucena, among many other managers in the sector. The Minister of Transport, Raquel Sánchez, announced that this Tuesday the Council of Ministers will authorize the construction of the new station passing through Puerta de A tocha. It is a gigantic work that will allow “to complete the total connection of the northern half and the southern half of Spain’s high-speed network”, according to Sánchez.
With this action, the main station of the Spanish capital will gain capacity, since it will have four new tracks on which trains can stop even if their route does not end there. In this way, it will offer more possibilities for travelers on corridors such as the one in Valencia, which now leave Chamartín and with the passing station will also have a stop in Atocha, so that the request of travelers and new operators will be answered private ones that have been added to Renfe’s offer over the last few months. Travelers from Barcelona will also benefit, because they will save on trips to Chamartín when they are forced to go through the center of Spain to go to Burgos or Santiago de Compostela, to give two examples.
After the approval of the Council of Ministers, the works – in charge of the administrator of railway infrastructures (Adif) – will go out to public tender for an amount close to 500 million euros and a term of execution of about five years.
Sánchez’s announcement comes at a time when the central government defends that it “invests more in conventional and commuter rail than in high speed” after many years of the opposite situation. The disinvestment of the last two decades is evident with the constant incidents recently suffered by the Cercanías de Madrid service, where the issue has become a matter of political debate just as Rodalies de Catalunya has been for years.
