A high speed rail plan for Europe? Let’s start with a high speed rail plan for France’s borders

The European Commission and the state owned railway companies are getting very excited about the idea there could be a EU masterplan for high speed rail.

With that in mind, let’s do a little thought experiment. This started as a Bluesky thread, and has been lightly edited into this blog entry.

Let’s assume that – short term – the best bet is to run more trains on existing high speed infrastructure, rather than building new high speed lines.

So imagine right now you have a fleet of 4 voltage, all signalling systems you want, 200m long, approved to run anywhere high speed trains (300km/h speed). Where do you deploy them? And as this is to be an EU plan, let’s focus on cross border routes.

I’d start with
Amsterdam 🇳🇱 – Bruxelles 🇧🇪 – Paris 🇫🇷
Eurostar (ex-Thalys) hasn’t added capacity here for 2 decades. it’s mostly high speed infrastructure. On Bruxelles – Paris there is plenty of capacity, through Antwerp a bit as well. Big cities, big demand, Eurostar costly. A no brainer.

Next would be
Paris 🇫🇷 / Bruxelles 🇧🇪 – London 🇬🇧
Yes as my #CrossChannelRail project showed, there are operational headaches through the Channel Tunnel, but there is – at least on the core routes – spare capacity too. Extend to Köln 🇩🇪, Frankfurt 🇩🇪, Basel 🇨🇭 or Zürich 🇨🇭 too if you want.

Then I’d look at
Paris 🇫🇷 – Germany 🇩🇪
There are between 5x and 7x a day to Frankfurt 🇩🇪, and 2 routes (via Saarbrücken or via Strasbourg), and Stuttgart 🇩🇪 and München 🇩🇪 are under served too. Yes, distances are long, but Frankfurt is time competitive with ✈️

Then it would be
Paris 🇫🇷 – Barcelona 🇪🇸
Yes, this takes 6.5 hours, but there are only 2x or 3x trains a day, but 6x a day to Perpignan from Paris! Add Bcn to Toulouse 🇫🇷, Lyon 🇫🇷, Marseille 🇫🇷 and you could use some trains here

Now it’s getting a bit harder, but
Paris 🇫🇷 – Zürich 🇨🇭
This has more potential than a service every two hours it has currently, not least as the “other” hours there’s a Paris – Mulhouse 🇫🇷 TGV that gets to within 20km of the border So there’s a little more you can do on this route

Likewise hard, as the infra through Chambéry, Modane is slow… but
Paris 🇫🇷 – Milano 🇮🇹
ought to have more than 4 trains a day each way (2 TGVs, 2 Frecciarossa currently), not least as more stopping in Lyon 🇫🇷 could make sense.

Then
Zürich 🇨🇭 / Basel 🇨🇭 or Genève 🇨🇭 – Montpellier 🇫🇷 – Barcelona 🇪🇸 / Madrid 🇪🇸
These routes would likely be highly seasonal, so would probably not be top of the list to do. But time wise, especially from Geneva, this would be workable

Next would be
Roma 🇮🇹 – Verona 🇮🇹 – Innsbruck 🇦🇹 – München 🇩🇪 And Roma 🇮🇹 – Venezia 🇮🇹 – Wien 🇦🇹 (once Koralmbahn open later this year)
Here all the high speed is on the Italian side, and at least Roma – München is in planning. But I think you could squeeze some more out of either of these routes

Perhaps
Zürich 🇨🇭 / Basel 🇨🇭 – Dijon 🇫🇷 – Charles de Gaulle ✈️ 🇫🇷 – Lille 🇫🇷 – Bruxelles 🇧🇪
At the moment this route needs a complex change across Paris, so eliminating that would make sense. Although there are probably not more than 2x or 3x a day to run here

And then…

What have we got?

There are some high-ish speed lines, like Berlin 🇩🇪 / Hamburg 🇩🇪 – Amsterdam 🇳🇱, or Hamburg 🇩🇪 – Berlin 🇩🇪 – Praha 🇨🇿, or København 🇩🇰 – Hamburg 🇩🇪 that need better services, but you’d not use 300km/h trains on these. Anything Spain 🇪🇸 – Portugal 🇵🇹 needs dual gauge trains, so is hard to do just now.

And there are some high speed projects in planning or being built that might in a few years change the picture:
Fehmarn Belt 🇩🇰-🇩🇪
Praha-Brno 🇨🇿
Rail Baltica 🇵🇱🇱🇹🇱🇻🇪🇪
CPK Project 🇵🇱
Lyon-Torino 🇫🇷🇮🇹
Basque-Y 🇪🇸 (implication for 🇫🇷)

So then – short term – what matters?

🇫🇷

And 🇫🇷 again

And then 🇫🇷 some more

If you want to boost high speed passenger rail in Europe, short term, pretty much ALL of the routes you need to sort out start or end in France

But

What is the only country in Europe to have reduced the size of its high speed train fleet?

Yes, that’s 🇫🇷

Has removed Spanish signalling from some of its TGVs so they cannot cross the border into Spain?

Yes, that’s 🇫🇷

Hasn’t installed the right version of ETCS on its TGVs to use them on German high speed lines?

Yeah, that’s 🇫🇷

Has been really sluggish installing ETCS on its own high speed lines so as to allow others to run on its own high speed lines?

Yes, that’s 🇫🇷 (well, and 🇩🇪)

Has refused to allow Renfe’s Talgo 106 to run on its high speed lines?

Yeah, you guessed it – 🇫🇷
(FWIW this one actually might be justified)

So basically if the European Commission wants to do something about high speed rail, cross border, in the short term it needs to pick up the phone and speak to Paris.