In exactly one month, on December 15, there will be a big change on Picardy trains! L'Étoile d'Amiens is the first railway network in Hauts-de-France to open up to rail competitionthis will be the case for two other lines, in the Nice area and one in the Nantes sector. In Picardy, it was SNCF Voyageurs Étoile d'Amiens, a company created separately, which won the call for tenders launched by the region: it employs 450 agents. On the Etoile d'Amiens, which has 10 lines – including Amiens/Compiègne, Amiens/Abbeville, Amiens/Saint-Quentin, Amiens/Laon, Amiens/Creil – the new operator is committed to increasing traffic on this network from mid-December.
200 trains will run every day on the Étoile d'Amiens, 9% more than now
200 trains will run every day: this is 9% more than at present: “This means more timing: before during the day, we could have two or three hours of waiting between two trains, now it will only be an hourunderlines Arnaud Ramackers, general director of SNCF Voyageurs Étoile d'Amiens. This will particularly concern the Amiens/Saint-Quentin, Amiens/Tergnier/Laon, Amiens/Abbeville lines..”
There are 15,000 travelers every day on the Étoile d’Amiens ; note this change from December 15 for regulars on the Amiens/Saint-Quentin route: “The K20, which links Amiens and Saint-Quentin, will stop at Villers-Bretonneux station, says Arnaud Ramackers. It is a decision taken in relation to the attendance, and in relation to the requests of travelers in this gare”.
The service will be managed from Amiens, Abbeville, Beauvais and Laon: enough to react more quickly in the event of a problempromises the new operator. A smooth network is what the vice-president of Hauts-de-France in charge of transport wants: “What I expect is that we do not fall back into the post-Covid failings, which had made us the worst railway region in France in terms of TER. Here I am quite confidentcontinues Christophe Coulon: there is a sufficient number of people, all the equipment“.
A train ticket soon to be more expensive in Hauts-de-France?
The region also specifies that it could increase the price of train tickets in 2025, due to budget cuts planned by the government: “The announcements made by the government deprive us of several tens of millions of euros to finance public servicesspecifies Christophe Coulon. As we do not have the possibility or the will to increase taxes: we have two possibilities, either we intervene less in projects, or we increase our revenue – we could therefore be led to increase the price of train tickets.”
“If we do it, it will be under extremely reasonable conditions, we are not going to make people pay what they cannot pay“, concludes the vice-president in charge of transport, who recalls that a first increase in prices took place at the beginning of 2024, after seven years without an increase “and having absorbed 17% of inflation before that”.
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