Images courtesy of Eurostar.
Going off the rails?
High-speed rail projects are being prioritised across Europe – Chris Beanland looks at the effect they have on air traffi c.
I
t’s no wonder there are nails being bitten in route planning offi ces across Europe. By 2020, a train journey from Paris to Barcelona will be sliced in half: four hours 30 minutes, versus the current eight-hour plus trip. That has big implications for air travel across France and Spain.
The change will be (partially) a result of state funding: the European Union is fi nancing a quarter of the construction costs of Europe’s latest high-speed railway, which will eventually allow trains to run at between 250 and 350km/h from Madrid via the Catalan capital to Paris. At a European governmental level, high-speed rail is in fashion, and aviation could pay the price for that. France started investing in high-speed rail at the end of the 1970s with its TGV, and Spain followed a decade later with the AVE. The two countries are now among the biggest spenders on high-speed rail in Europe, so a link between the two countries makes sense.
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Perpignan–Figueras now open In January 2011, a key section of the line was opened from Perpignan in France to Figueras in Catalonia. The 44km sector includes a new 8km tunnel under the Pyrenees and allows trains to run at a nippy 350km/h. The European Union pumped €70 million into this latest part of the scheme, a 25% funding injection, as part of its Trans-European Transport Networks (TEN-T) scheme – making this a priority trans-national railway route. In EU-speak, this is the “High Speed Railway axis of South West Europe – Priority Route 3”.
The latest link irons out complications that arose from the Spanish using a broader gauge (ie the wheels on their trains are further apart) than the rest of the European rail network. The different gauges meant trains crossing the border had to stop and readjust their settings. The new Spanish high-speed network is being built at the standard gauge to allow inter-operability across different countries. TGVs will be able to sweep
into Spain and AVEs will be able to penetrate up into France.
When added into the recently opened Madrid–Barcelona high-speed line, it makes new high-speed rail journeys much more attractive and, once the Nimes bypass is completed, there will be a complete high-speed link from Madrid to Paris, via Barcelona, Montpellier and Lyon. This means that journeys such as Lyon–Madrid, Lyon–Barcelona, Montpelier–Madrid, Paris–Madrid and Paris–Barcelona will suddenly become more attractive propositions by rail. Spanish rail operator RENFE and French state railways SNCF will form a joint business modelled on the Franco-Belgian-British Eurostar company to run these new cross-border services from the line’s ultimate completion date in 2020.
How will it affect airlines? So what effect will all this have on airlines and airports? Airlines slashed capacity on the Madrid–Barcelona route
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