Behind schedule. The RER E will finally serve Mantes-la-Jolie at the start of 2027, with only a few trains per hour, then at the end of 2029 a full service with six trains per hour during rush hour will be available, explained SNCF network, Friday November 29.
The SNCF is late. The extension of the RER E to the west towards Mantes-la-Jolie, in Yvelines, will suffer a further delay with full commissioning now planned for the end of 2029 instead of the end of 2026, even if partial commissioning will have will take place in early 2027, SNCF Réseau said on Friday.
The installation of the “new digitalization system for signaling and switches” is encountering problems, explained SNCF Réseau, project owner, confirming information from Le Parisien. “Its development and deployment in the Mantes sector, very demanding due to the density of local traffic, are not sufficiently advanced at this stage.”
These difficulties make it impossible to open the full service at the end of 2026, as initially planned. The opening will therefore take place “in two stages”, specifies the infrastructure manager. The RER E, opened in 1999 and the shortest line in the regional express network with a length of 52 kilometers, will serve Mantes-la-Jolie at the start of 2027, with only a few trains per hour, then at the end of 2029 a full service with six trains per hour during peak hours will be available.
“It’s really a shock”
“Talking to us about 2030 for a full Eole service (the name of the RER E extension project to the west of Paris) is really a shock. We are falling out of the closet,” reacted the president of the Ile-de-France region Valérie Pécresse, in Le Parisien. “It is a project which has been the subject of constant investment for years, which is late, which has an additional cost of 50%. And when we paid off the additional costs, the project owners told me that these were the last delays. So I admit, I am angry,” she added.
Eole is now valued at 5.4 billion euros, compared to 3.7 billion announced at start-up in 2015. A first extension with an 8 km tunnel between Saint-Lazare station in Paris and Nanterre-La Folie via La Défense was inaugurated in May, just before the Olympic Games.
“The extension to Nanterre before the Olympic Games was only held by a miracle, because of the firmness of the State,” assured Valérie Pécresse, still in Le Parisien. “My fear was that this absolutely colossal energy which had been put into the Olympics to ensure that the trains arrived on time would disintegrate after the Games. We are there,” she lamented.
On Thursday, more bad news was announced with the delay in the commissioning of line 15 South of the Grand Paris Express, now scheduled for the summer of 2026 instead of the end of 2025.
