Credit to France24.
After
months of delays, the first direct high-speed rail link to connect Paris with
Barcelona was opened on Sunday.
The joint project from France’s
state rail operator SNCF and its Spanish equivalent Renfe will see
two TGV (high-speed train) services run between the French capital and the
Catalan city each day, with a journey time of just under six-and-a-half hours.
Although this is only around 20
minutes quicker than before, passengers will now no longer need to change
services, while journey times will be cut further to five hours and 35 minutes
when a new section of high-speed rail track is
opened between Perpignan and Nîmes in France in 2017.
There will also be daily services
from the French cities of Lyon, Toulouse and Marseille.
Tickets will cost from 59 euros one
way between Paris and Barcelona and have already proved popular with more than
30,000 sold, according to SNCF, which expects to see around a million
passengers use the service in 2014.
Technical problems
In the pipeline since 2008, the new
cross-border services were originally scheduled to begin in the first half of
2013, but were delayed due to a number of technical problems.
According to SNCF, this was largely
down to the difficulty of adapting its trains to run on Spanish track, while
Renfe had similar problems in preparing its trains for operation in France.
“It took 18 months to get it
right," said Jean-Yves Leclercq, SNCF’s director for Europe.
The project saw the construction of
a new high-speed rail line in Spain between Barcelona and Figueres, near the
French border, at a cost of 3.7 billion euros, while SNCF spent between five
and ten million euros on upgrades to its train
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