Renfe high-speed trains will connect Toulouse to Barcelona from April 2025, via Perpignan and Carcassonne

Un AVE en gare de Saragosse, le type de train fabriqué par Alstom que l’on retrouvera sur Toulouse – Barcelone. O. L. N.

After opening two lines to Lyon and Marseille in 2023 and transporting more than 600,000 passengers, the Spanish railway company is creating a link between the two major economic capitals.

The Spanish company Renfe is stealing the show from SNCF. From the second quarter of 2025, the rail carrier will launch a high-speed link between Toulouse and Barcelona, ​​serving the Languedoc and Roussillon cities of Carcassonne and Perpignan.

Two more stops in the region

This Friday, confirming a project mentioned by its president, Raül Blanco, in June 2023, which will however have been postponed by a few months, Renfe announced that it will open its third line (in France, Editor's note) in the second quarter of 2025 to connect Barcelona and Toulouse, with stops in Girona, Figueres, Perpignan and Carcassonne. This latter line joins the Catalan city, Narbonne, Montpellier and Nîmes, already on the Spanish AVE map.

To do this, the operator needs to extend the safety certificate it has for its first two French lines. The application has been submitted to EUAR, the European Union Railway Agency, and the paths on the track requested from SNCF Réseau, based on timetables that allow for connecting this offer with the rest of the AVE offer in Spain and France, to optimize connections and liaisons".

The line will initially be seasonal, from the beginning of April to mid-September, and will be made permanent – ​​the approach was the same for Lyon – Barcelona and Marseille – Madrid – if it is successful. In addition to tourists, the company is counting on a professional and business clientele between the French regional capital and Spain's second largest city, two major industrial hubs. It will take 3h30 for its AVE S100s to travel from city centre to city centre, compared to four by car on the A9 and 4h30 via Andorra.

It is this same clientele that it would like to capture, tomorrow, between Marseille, Lyon and Paris.

Paris still in the viewfinder

The Spanish company has reiterated several times since the summer of 2023 its intention to add these AVEs to the SNCF TGVs and Trenitalia Frecciarossas on this very profitable section. It even dreamed of taking the Iberian delegation of the 2024 Olympic Games to Paris on board its trains. But it must still wait, pending the approval of its Talgo S106s in France. Two weeks ago, the Minister of Transport in Madrid accused France of doing everything possible to prevent a real liberalisation process in its market, in an interview with the daily newspaper El Pais.

The first of the thirty S106 trains ordered entered service on 21 May on the other side of the border, in Galicia and Asturias. With a delay of almost two years attributable to the manufacturer and not without technical difficulties during these first months of operation, which put Renfe on the grill. In August, El Pais reported 479 incidents during the first weeks of use. Problems that Talgo must resolve and that complicate Renfe's project to Paris.

Read also: Renfe: 300 km/h test trip between Lyon and Barcelona in an AVE, one week before launch