France today abandoned ambitious plans which would almost have doubled its network of high speed railway lines over the next two decades, reports The Independent.
A cross-party report, accepted by the government, delayed for at least 17 years ten new railway projects, including new fast lines to Normandy, the Cote d’Azur and Spain.
Pharaonic but unfunded Euros 250bn transport scheme promised by the former President Nicolas Sarkozy, including other high speed railway lines and a deep-water canal linking Paris to the North Sea, can simply not be built in the present economic climate, the government has concluded.
Instead the Prime Minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, has accepted the report’s recommendation that up to Euros 2.4bn a year should be spent on a raft of small projects to remove bottlenecks in the existing road and railway networks. The only new “ligne a grande vitesse” (high speed line) to survive the massacre will be an extension to Toulouse of a line already under construction from Paris to Bordeaux.
A projected line through tunnels in the Alps from Lyon to Turin is not covered by the report because it is the subject of a Franco-Italian treaty.
Read more of this report from The Independent.