The infrastructure manager closes the Paris-Lyon high-speed line for four days. Some trains will run via the classic line, but with a significantly longer journey time.
A complicated weekend ahead on track. The high-speed line between Paris and Lyon, to the north of Valencia, will be completely closed between this Saturday November 9 and Tuesday November 12 inclusive. The SNCF and Trenitalia companies will still be able to operate trains using traditional lines, but their number will be greatly reduced and their journey time considerably lengthened. It will therefore take at least 4 hours 15 minutes between Paris and Lyon compared to two hours in normal times, and almost seven hours between Paris and Marseille compared to 3 hours 30 minutes in normal times.
Barely “30% of the nominal TGV offer will run across the entire South-East axis”warns SNCF Voyageurs. Nice will not be served over the weekend by the TGV which will not go beyond Toulon, just like Perpignan and Toulouse via Montpellier. The Paris-Barcelona, Brussels-Marseille and Paris-Milan will not run. Its competitor Trenitalia will also reduce the size, maintaining two Paris-Lyon round trips per day instead of five. Renfe has not communicated on the subject, but its daily TGV between Lyon and Barcelona is not available for reservation over the four days of closure.
Also read
Slower but cheaper: what is the new “Ouigo classic train” worth?
+25% forward trains
For passengers, this is not a surprise: SNCF Réseau communicated in February about this closure, and the tickets on sale take the additional travel time into account. This work remains no less handicapping for those who would have liked to take advantage of the long weekend with Monday bank holiday to travel by train, but the infrastructure manager assures that it is necessary to go through this unpleasant interruption to improve the performance of this very busy line, used every day by 240 trains on average, or a third of French high-speed rail traffic.
These four days of closure will in fact allow SNCF Réseau to complete the deployment of ERTMS (European Rail Traffic Management System), a European signaling system which will ultimately allow more trains to run on this line which is close to saturation. . “This system knows the position and speed of all trains in real time and directly gives the driver the speed he must respect, based on the characteristics of the train”details the infrastructure manager. This will notably make it possible to reduce the spacing between trains, resulting in a 25% gain in capacity on the Paris-Lyon route by 2030, by increasing to 16 trains per hour per direction compared to 13 today.
After five years of work, “no impact for travelers”assures SNCF Réseau, these four days of interruption will allow “the commissioning of 58 new signal stations and a new line control center in Lyon”. A 101-hour intervention which will also mobilize 22 trains running idle. This project, called “LGV+”, will have cost 820 million euros, mainly financed by SNCF Réseau, with a contribution from the European Union of 120 million euros.
In France, the ERTMS system is already deployed on the Paris-Strasbourg, Tours-Bordeaux and Rennes-Le Mans high-speed lines. By 2031, it should also be deployed on the classic line between Marseille and Ventimiglia, on the Italian border.
France
