Martí Puig and Leonardi |
Barcelona (EFE) the new route that connects Barcelona with Lyon.
The AVE brand convoy left on time, at 8:22 a.m., and should arrive in Lyon at 1:20 p.m. It will start up again at 2:30 p.m. and end its journey in the Catalan capital at 7:32 p.m. In between, he will have stopped in Girona, Figueres, Perpignan, Narbonne, Béziers, Montpellier, Nimes and Valence.
With a capacity for about 330 passengers, the first trip on this route has had 240 people on board, including a group of journalists and a few train lovers.
The interior of the convoy makes it clear that Renfe’s French adventure is not limited to Lyon: on the 28th of this month the connection between Madrid and Marseille will start up, and by the summer of 2024 the operator aims to reach Paris from Barcelona .
Hence the message inscribed on the walls, surrounded by iconic photographs of the Tour de France from the EFE archive: “Queen stage, target Paris.”
The illusion of the drivers
Ricard Codina and Alberto Langarita are two of the four engineers in charge of driving this train on its opening day. Langarita has had the privilege of being the first Spanish train driver to go beyond Perpignan, while Codina will be the first to make the last leg of the return trip.
Once past the El Pertús tunnel, Codina explains how different it is to drive in one country or another: if in aviation the codes are international and English is the common language, in the case of the train it is necessary to know the language of the country to perfectly and adapt to existing security protocols and systems (in France, for example, they have not yet fully adopted the European ERTMS system).
It also gives details of the operation: from Barcelona to Girona you can travel at a maximum of 200 kilometers per hour, because the track is shared with freight trains; from Perpignan to Nîmes the conventional track gauge requires driving at 160 kilometers per hour; and in the rest of the sections it does reach 300 kilometers per hour.
The first thing is corroborated by Robert Gurt, a Renfe freight train driver accompanied by two other professional colleagues: he has not had the opportunity to go beyond Perpignan and did not want to miss the occasion in which a colleague did exceed that destination.
A few carriages further on, after closing the doors at the Perpignan station, Sergio Berzosa, who works as a train attendant, informs that, once the border is crossed, he has to assume one more function: that of asking for tickets from those who they get on the train, because in many French stations there is only a security control but not the usual validation of the ticket that does occur in Spain.
Joan’s birthday present
Óscar, 6 years old, Víctor, 7, and Sofía, 9, wanted to travel by train and visit abroad, so Eva Martínez, the mother of the three little ones, turned on the light: let’s give away to Joan Velázquez, the father, one day in Perpignan taking advantage of the occasion.
The family passion for the railway comes from grandfather Luis, who spends hours in the garage of his house assembling two model trains with the invaluable help of the little ones. In turn, Luis owes his love for the railway to his grandfather, who years ago was a station manager in Alcázar de San Juan, in Ciudad Real.
Since the day was full of trains, the family woke up at 6.30 to go from Matadepera to Terrassa to take the Generalitat Railway (FGC). Then it was time to go from Plaza Cataluña to Sants and from Sants to Perpignan, where after a good delicacy the way back awaits. It was bad.
Renfe’s trip after its divorce with SNCF
Renfe’s French adventure is not new, but his solo experience in France is.
Until the end of 2022 Renfe operated with Elipsos, a joint venture with the French public railway SNCF, the three high-speed lines between the two countries: Barcelona-Paris, Barcelona-Lyon and Madrid-Marseille. Then, the Spanish train drivers flew to Perpignan and passed the baton there to their French colleagues.
But the marriage came to an end when SNCF decided, unilaterally, to break the joint venture to start providing the service between Barcelona and Paris alone from December 11, 2022.
After this rupture, and once the appropriate permits and accreditations from the French authorities were obtained in December 2022, in addition to the training of personnel, Renfe has made its debut in a country that has proven to be more restrictive than Spain for foreign operators.
In fact, Spain has long been demanding reciprocity from the rest of the European Union countries when it comes to allowing third-party operators to enter and describes the obstacles to liberalization in some of them as unjustifiable.