Like that athlete who has been training for years but does not achieve the necessary mark to participate in the Olympic Games, Renfe will not aspire to a medal. The dream of the company’s senior officials was to take on board the AVE the Olympians who participate in the sporting event par excellence, which will take place from July 26 to August 11, but they are already clear that this will not be possible.
The image was going to be the culmination of a long bureaucratic and technical process that has dragged on for years, since Renfe and its French counterpart, SNCF, broke the cooperation agreement in an unfriendly manner and the Barcelona-Paris corridor was left in the sole hands of the French company. The Olympic Games were the date marked in red since last summer, but the president of Renfe, Raül Blanco, already assumes that the Spanish company’s trains will still not arrive in Paris on that date.
“We hope to arrive in the last quarter of the year,” Blanco said yesterday at the Llobregat Business Forum held in l’Hospitalet. The Olympic dream has been ruined due to the complex procedures with the French infrastructure administrator and the slow homologation of the S-106 trains, the new model manufactured by Talgo, also called Avril.
In the Ministry of Transport there is discontent due to the bureaucratic obstacles of the French. If until now it was those responsible for Renfe who complained bitterly, Minister Óscar Puente began to do so openly two weeks ago: “I would like that when Renfe goes to work outside of Spain and, specifically, in our neighboring country, where Ouigo comes from, we would have the same facility that they have to work here,” Puente lamented.
The arrival in the French capital is the second phase of the Spanish operator’s entry into France. “The objective is clear, we are going to be in Paris this year,” the president of Renfe insisted yesterday, after celebrating that since last June more than 310,000 passengers have been transported between Barcelona and Lyon, Marseille and the intermediate stations in the south. from France. Despite having an average occupancy of 80%, the route that is really profitable is the Barcelona-Paris, now only in the hands of the SNCF.
Renfe will have the free paths between Lyon and Paris that the French infrastructure administrator (SNCF Reseau) has granted it as of September 1, although the specific date of entry into service with passengers has not been determined. Sources in the sector place it more in the last weeks of the year. When that time comes, Renfe hopes to have up to 16 daily circulations in France. This is a much higher figure than the current one, with only four, one in each direction between Madrid and Marseille and another between Barcelona and Lyon. As was done on both routes already operational, the deployment of the service to Paris will be gradual. In those cases it started on weekends during the summer and since autumn it has started to have daily offers.
Of the 16 planned circulations (eight in each direction), not all will connect Spain with France. A minimum of two of them will go from Marseille to Paris via Lyon, the main French mobility corridor that connects the three largest cities in the country and which until now only offers SNCF. The French from Trenitalia do it only between Lyon and Paris. French travelers trust that the entry of Renfe on national routes in the neighboring country will lead to a reduction in ticket prices, the same effect that the arrival of Ouigo to the Barcelona-Madrid corridor caused with railway liberalization.
