Build Paris-Frankfurt High-Speed Rail
European high-speed rail networks end at national borders. There’s a good TGV network internal to France, and a good ICE network internal to Germany, but crossing borders is always onerous. Thalys trains between France and Belgium are atypically expensive, and the other cross-border lines always have slow zones such that average speeds are never high. For example, Paris-Frankfurt, the topic of this post, is fast on the French side but not on the German side, so that trains take 3:49 on most connections to do 584 kilometers. Against the poor service offered across borders in Europe, the Green advocate Jon Worth has called for improvements in service on existing lines, favoring regional and interregional connections. But now there’s a petition circulating around the EU calling for a Union-wide high-speed rail program connecting all capitals (I presume excluding island ones like Valletta). The petition is atypical for EU-level policy, in that it is written in plain language and talks about the benefits of high-speed rail rather than about obscure EU institutions that nobody outsides the Brussels bubble knows or cares about; I urge EU citizens to sign, to force the EU to take this infrastructure issue more seriously.
Infrastructure problems and operating problems
Not a single cross-border connection in Europe has both infrastructure and service that are as good as what is provided on the strongest domestic networks. I wrote about how the TGV provides good domestic service, overperforming models trained on foreign networks like the Shinkansen (as does, to a lesser extent, Germany). Most provincial cities are connected to Paris at an average speed higher than 200 km/h – Bordeaux is 2:06 and 538 km from Paris, averaging 256 km/h, and the trains run mostly hourly, with one 1.5-hour midday gap.
German trains never run this fast. The fastest connections between major cities are Berlin-Hamburg, currently 289 km in 1:43, and Cologne-Frankfurt, 177 km that is currently 1:17 but that I have seen done in about 1:05. But the frequency is hourly with additional slightly slower trains in between, and the connections to regional lines are much better than anything offered in France. German high-speed rail infrastructure is far behind what France has and advocates refuse to learn from France’s success, but operations here are better.
And then between countries, nothing is as good as what’s available domestically in either country. The only pair of major European cities connected at high speed across borders is Paris-Brussels, 314 km in 1:22 or 230 km/h, with trains having two 1.5-hour gaps but otherwise running a mix of hourly and twice hourly. But the fares are considerably higher: looking at trains on the 12th of July, I’m seeing mostly 82-109€ fares with a few 70€ tickets and one 57€ itinerary, while the longer Paris-Lyon connection offers many tickets in the 60s and several, run by Trenitalia rather than SNCF, for 35-39€. Where the TGV averages about 0.10€/passenger-km in fare receipts, Thalys averages 0.21€ if 2019 turnover and 2017 p-km can be compared.
Elsewhere, average speeds are nowhere near what Thalys achieves. Paris-Frankfurt, as mentioned in the lede, is 3:49 over about 585 km, for an average of 153 km/h; it’s a respectable speed for an ICE train, but ICEs run hourly whereas Paris-Frankfurt runs every two hours with a four-hour gap. Moreover, Paris-Frankfurt as far as I can tell has the best operations of any cross-border line in Western Europe, in the sense that the headway between trains is (other than the one four-hour gap) much less than the one-way trip time, and the fares look mostly the same as those of domestic TGVs and ICEs over the same length.
It is imperative to build a system of cross-border trains in Europe with both good operations – frequent, reliable, well-connected to other lines, and charging 0.10€/km for the privilege and not twice that. So why is Paris-Frankfurt the best way to do it?
The issue of SNCF
To rail watchers outside France, and even sometimes within it, SNCF is public enemy #1. My above-linked previous post goes over some of the ways SNCF degrades service just to spite any possible competitor (though, of note, Paris-Lyon has Trenitalia service). It gets to the point that Jon and other people interested in EU-wide policy keep talking about operations and about how it’s possible, usually through private competition, to coerce SNCF to be more accommodating.
The problem with this mentality is that SNCF’s service, fundamentally, works where it needs to. Domestic rail ridership is no longer the highest in Europe, DB having overtaken it in the 2010s, but remains about on a par with Germany per capita and higher than other large countries. Passenger-km performance, of more relevance to intercity rail, is very good: on pre-corona numbers, France is about on a par per capita with Austria and better than any other EU state except possibly the Netherlands, which doesn’t report those numbers. From SNCF’s perspective, privatizing eurocrats are trying to mess with its perfectly working system. No wonder they’re resistant. With the EU run by people who mostly think in terms of obscure EU institutions and don’t really know the technical details of trains well, any coercion sufficiently strong to get past SNCF resistance is likely to destroy the system rather than reform it to provide better service.
Now, people in France are aware that French economic performance is not great. France is nowhere near having the cultural cringe toward Northern Europe that Italy and Spain have. But on the ground and in politics, people are aware of Northern Europe’s superior economic performance in the last 15 years. However, so long as the TGV is the premier rail system in Europe, there is no pressure to change anything: France, unlike Spain, is sufficiently proud of itself that it is aware of its strengths, and therefore has little interest in Germanizing on matters where Germany is not clearly well ahead.
Ironically, this means that the best way to get SNCF to behave better is to improve German and perhaps British trains to the point that French people can look up to them rather than denigrate their insufficient speed. A domestic German train network that offers present-day or better levels of connectivity but also French or near-French speeds would get a large boost to ridership, eclipsing ridership on the TGV with its difficulties with expanding beyond its core Paris-province market, and showcasing good service to French travelers that they’d agitate for better. Even on the matter of improving SNCF operations, the best way forward is to improve the quality of physical infrastructure for high-speed rail in Germany and show that Germany can build things too rather than take decades to do anything.
Why Paris-Frankfurt
The Shinkansen began with Tokyo-Osaka, and the TGV with Paris-Lyon. Even less flashy programs began with strong lines – the Zurich S-Bahn began with fast commuter rail service on the Goldcoast, a rich region where suburbanization out of Zurich began early, creating much demand for regional service. The first line showcasing a program cannot be a small pilot; pilot programs are replete in the visionless United States, and there people have learned, correctly, to mistrust anything politicians and agency heads say about bringing the future.
Thalys and Eurostar, in a way, created a strong initial system, for the benefit of rich travelers. Paris, Brussels, and London are connected by fast trains, with the connections to London in practice slower due to the extra time required for security theater, passport checks, and airline-style boarding. The business traveler for whom spending 80€ for a 1.5-hour trip is no big deal loves taking the train between Paris and Brussels; Diego Beghin has mentioned how coworkers take the train to Paris but drive or fly to Germany, since Belgium-Germany trains are too slow to bother with (Brussels-Aachen is 175 km in 1:12). With enough of a volume of high-end travelers, SNCF, which owns the majority of Thalys, sees little reason to change its way for a social mission beyond French borders; thus, the first line showcasing cross-border rail for the entire population must be elsewhere.
This is where Paris-Frankfurt comes in. The connection is 584 km today, 379 km from Paris to Saarbrüucken (322 fast, 57 slow) in 1:50 and another 205 on the German side in about two hours. An entirely high-speed connection would be a few kilometers shorter if it went via Mannheim as trains do today; if it skipped Mannheim to avoid overloading the Frankfurt-Mannheim link, and went via Mainz instead, it would be around 170 km instead. Cutting about 15 minutes from the French side and then cutting the German side to a one-way trip of 45 minutes should be viable, with some tunneling but less than most German lines; this would create a one-way trip time of around 2:20 between the two cities.
The cost should be around 6 billion €. This is for about 160 km on the German side (the other 10 km are legacy approaches to Frankfurt and Saarbrücken) plus 40 km on the French side; German high-speed rail costs are generally considered to be 30 million € per kilometer with average German levels of tunneling.
The population served would be large. German metro area definitions are always iffy, but Frankfurt’s region, Hesse-Darmstadt, has 4 million people. Then, the former region of Rheinhessen-Pfalz, home to both Mainz and Kaiserslautern as well as some smaller cities with decent regional connections to them, has another 2.1 million people, of whom some must be assigned to the Rhine-Neckar Region but the rest can be deemed to be in the Mainz or Kaiserslautern sheds. The state of Saarland has a million people, and the binational functional urban area straddling it and France has 800,000. Moreover, the business and general connections between Paris and Frankfurt are healthy for an international connection; the size of the cities connected potentially makes this an even stronger link than Paris-Brussels if both infrastructure and operations are good.
The usual Shinkansen-trained model I use for predicting high-speed rail ridership has the combination of Paris-Frankfurt, Paris-Rheinhessen-Pfalz, and Paris-Saarbrücken at 12.8 million passengers a year, which should fill two trains per hour; if ridership overperforms as domestic TGVs do, multiply that by 1.5. The current offer is a train every two hours, but Paris-Frankfurt really is weakened by the mediocre trip time. The elasticity of ridership with respect to trip time is about -2, which means going from 3:49 to 2:20 is a factor of 2.7 increase in ridership. This, in turn, should permit running more frequency, which shouldn’t have much impact on end-to-end traffic (it’s already incorporated into the model) but should strongly buoy the intermediate points; today, the Paris-Saarbrücken frequency is a brutal four trains per day, since some trains run express to Frankfurt. In addition to 12.8 million international passengers, the model predicts a good deal of intra-German traffic, depending on how fast the other German connections are – Frankfurt-Saarbrücken is not by itself strong, but it would speed up connections from Saarbrücken to Cologne, the entire Ruhr, Stuttgart, Munich, and eventually Berlin.
A strong first line, like Paris-Lyon or Tokyo-Osaka, is likely to stimulate popular demand for more. It would not be a niche – broad sections of society in France and Germany would be familiar and only lament that the same quality of service, offered domestically and on this line, is not available on links like Paris-Amsterdam, Amsterdam-Cologne, or Brussels-Cologne, and eventually on other cross-border European links, covering the entire Union through accretion of more city pairs.
Pedestrian Observations 
Good and interesting post, quip on American pilot projects was great 🙂 A post on the history and importance of hourly trains for intercity services would be useful for Americans, who think anything more than one daily train is high frequency. Any thoughts on Brightline in Florida or Brightline West?
Is there a “cynicism treadmill” in the US on this topic? Due to a lack of willingness to risk lots of capital (or political capital) on projects of this kind, only proposals that overpromise get investment, and the resulting underperformance reinforces the wary attitude. E.g. the Simpsons’ monorail episode has no European-media counterpart that I know of. Even on the less functional fringes, e.g. Hungary, with the exception of the Chinese belt-and-road Budapest-Belgrade “high-speed freight line” the problem(s) is/are not that of an unrealistically rosy vision. (And even in that case, technically the overly rosy vision is foreign-/geopolitical, not one of commercial success.) E.g. the M4 is not a bad idea, just incandescently expensive (and, given that its termini are train stations, perhaps it should have been an S-Bahn tunnel instead?).
This can interoperate with other problems, e.g. Alon mentioned that currently the most culturally influential sector in the US is software, thus it is common to silently assume that laying a minimal-capital-expenditure product over existing commerce is an approach that has non-negligible chances of working, and is a good way to gauge whether the idea has merit and is worth scaling up.
Oh, absolutely. One of the two major American political parties is centered on the idea that government is inherently wasteful and corrupt, and so it’s better to try to seize the levers of power for personal gain, and as much to the point, that social/communal good is an immoral or incoherent concept. A good portion of the other major political party secretly agrees with them, and yet another, very influential portion seems intent on proving them all right.
The remainder of us who believe both that government can do good and that good can be a thing shared by many people are mostly left to seethe and writhe.
Road distance according to Google maps Paris-Brussels-Colonge is shorter than Paris-Frankfurt. If I’m in Paris and I want to get to Cologne I don’t care if the train passes through Frankfurt or Brussels. I have a suspicion that the tracks for Paris-Brussels-Colonge could also be the tracks for London-Brussels-Cologne.
Plus the German ICE trains in Brussels have good timed connections with the Eurostar right now which helps.
Yeah, rushing across the station because our Eurostar was delayed a few minutes and just barely making the ICE was fun. The airline-style platform arrangement of Eurostar is such a drag on ridership…
Seat61 says that the ICE will wait for a late Eurostar – maybe its wrong 🤷🏼♂️.
I mean, we made the train, it was just very close and the walk distance between the platforms was long.
Yeah the issue with any connection to/from Eurostar is that since the platforms are segregated for security theatre, forget about any cross-platform transfer. And even going down from the platform and going to another one is more time consuming than usual.
if you want to fly from London to Frankfurt ….. there’s gonna be a lot of airline style everything.
It’s post-Brexit b.s. that has slowed down Eurostar boarding. It was quite good before Brexit because only a minority of pax (like me) were subject to interrogation. Because of this, Eurostar now only load 2/3rd of train pax capacity otherwise they apparently can’t run to timetable. This in turn has forced them to increase ticket costs and reduce the number of cheap tickets. Altogether regressive, but blame the Brits. The same factor has handicapped, perhaps permanently, the London to Amsterdam and to Cologne Eurostars.
Likewise, surely that Brussels platform thing is down to the Brits insistence on passport control.
Even the CEO of Eurostar Gwendoline Cazenave complained: “Even I – I have a work permit, they know who I am – they ask: ‘What are you going to do in the UK?’. It takes almost 30% more time [than before].”
Returning to the UK used to infuriate me because I had lived and worked there for years, with a long-term work visa, yet you’d get quizzed the most ridiculous stuff. Once I was asked how much money I had in my UK bank account (I suppose to ensure I had enough to survive without recourse to the dole if I suddenly quit my job …).
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/jan/24/eurostar-trains-empty-seats-brexit-passport-rules-london-paris-brussels
Eurostar trains forced to run with empty seats due to Brexit passport rules
About 350 out of 900 seats normally left unsold on the first services between London, Paris and Brussels
Gwyn Topham, 24 Jan 2023
My experience is from 2018, so after the vote but before formal Brexit. It was completely broken during high season, and the limiting factor was not security but the platform boarding process.
There’s definitely three separate issues with Eurostar.
One is the platform boarding process which is insane, but also should be fixable by Eurostar just allowing security screened passengers to board. Given they have 6 platforms (with space for at least 7) and run at most 3 trains per hour it’s difficult for me to understand why you can’t be allowed to board the train 45-60 minutes beforehand.
The second issue is the passport checks, these aren’t going away but could be done on board the train. I’m not sure for the classic destinations that you would speed things up much if at all, but you would have the freedom to travel beyond the classic destinations without too much fuss.
The third issue which is almost certainly unfixable is the X Ray baggage screening, but that could just be done by the local police/staff in each local station, plus there would be advantages to all the other major stations in having the option to X Ray screen passengers in case of a security alert. If there’s a good pan-European high speed rail network some level of X Ray screening will almost certainly happen regardless.
There’s also certainly been a whole issue the whole time with a lack of imagination from Eurostar. Why they had to run their Lyon train so you had to get to St Pancras for half 6 in the morning is beyond me.
Just tip England into the North Sea. ASAP.
I don’t understand that. They must have changed things because whenever I used Eurostar (only at Paris-Nord and London) it worked like Matthew Hutton’s first point: you were able to board when you cleared C&I and went down to the platform, trains sitting there with doors open. It’s also not what Cazenave and the article seemed to be saying, though they may well have their own agenda.
The point is that Brussels-Cologne is a slow line; it’s 252 km in 1:50 (plus more than an hour this summer due to repair works that are somehow timed for peak travel season). It has some high-speed parts, but the average speed is not good, and then compounded with Thalys’s hostile pricing, ridership is naturally going to underperform.
Thalys prices are actually reasonable on non-Paris routes, maybe because they do know their service isn’t that much better than the alternatives (taking other trains or driving).
Speeding up Brussels-Cologne on the Belgian side means
1. Fixing the mess in Brussels between Midi and Nord. This urgently needs an Utrecht-style rebuild, which would increase the speed and reliability of all trains, not just the high speed ones. This should save around 6 min.
2. Getting to the E40 alignment towards Liège much earlier, before Leuven. This is a bit tricky because the best place to place a flying junction on the legacy line is near the airport: it’s the point of closest approach to the E40 (only 1.5 km away) and the area around the tracks is mostly clear but… there’s already a flying junction towards the airport. Not sure if there’s enough space left for 200 km/h diverging tracks. Could save around 4 min by allowing a consistent 200+ km/h after Brussels Nord and avoiding Leuven station before joining the high speed line.
3. Fixing the godawfully slow Western approach of Liège. The trains go out of the high speed line through a screeching halt through the station of Ans at 140 km/h and then the speed limit goes even further down to 70 km/h on the last 6 km to Liège Guillemins. Higher speeds here should save 3-4 min.
On the German side, it’s a hige slow zone around Aachen from the Belgian border up to halfway to Cologne. They should extend the high speed line from Cologne and fix the approaches. Could save 15 min?
Sounds like you could relatively easily/worthwhiley get Paris-Brussels-Cologne to under 3 hours.
Yeah, and most of the speedup would benefit local trains too since the worst slowdowns are in and around cities.
Are we looking at the same facts here? According to OpenRailwayMap (appreciate it may not be accurate so happy to be corrected if are familiar with local line speed publications), from the west it’s 140km/h through Ans for quite some time, then 120km/h up to where the line from Liege-Carre crosses under, which is less than 1km away from the western platform ends of Guillemin. The fast lines through Guillemin is 90km/h through the station, then 100 out the other side before rising to 120km/h just east of the river.
OpenRailwayMap is wrong, or maybe it can’t handle it when the speed limit is different for opposing directions. On the way down to Guillemins the speed limit is 70 km/h, I can confirm as I’ve been there many times.
Have you seen the speed boards or read official technical documentation? Or were you GPS recording your trips?
No need to get fancy, if you connect to the Thalys wifi they show you the live speed.
Hmmm, I don’t think we’ll ever know for definite unless we have access to official documentations or know the details of the timetable generation process. There are a lot of reasons why on-the-day speeds might be lower – adhesion, defensive driving, or a late train in front. For the moment I’ll believe OpenRailwayMap on the balance of probability.
Big “who am I supposed to believe, you or my own lying eyes” energy.
openrailwaymap.org is explicitly user-generated, and explicitly non-authorititative. Jesus.
Anyway, if instead of arguing with somebody who has first-hand knowledge, one can just fucking do the work of looking it up.
eg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzQDgC6IRGs “Cab ride AM 80 : Mons – Bruxelles – Liège Guillemins” (2 years old) SOOOOO SLOOOOOOW
or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzQDgC6IRGs “{ cab ride } de ANS à LIÈGE GUILLEMINS” (2 years old)
or several others.
Departing Ans KP94.4 speed board 70kmh https://youtu.be/2nrXzY1KDIM?t=7223
KP95.3 50kmh (temporary) https://youtu.be/2nrXzY1KDIM?t=7316
KP99.1 speed signal https://youtu.be/2nrXzY1KDIM?t=7606 indicating indicating 40kmh for us which makes sense for the what look like crappy slow ~190m ~1:9 turnouts on the diverging route we’re about to take into Liège Guillemins.
Max 70kmh through the station (all tracks as far as I see in multiple videos) with 90kmh upcoming exiting to the east.
Yeah, so 0m of 140km between Ans and Liège Guillemins
Richard Mlynarik – are you incapable of not being rude?
I didn’t consider a small sample of passenger information conclusive evidence, but I’ll take cab videos. Despite your rudeness – thank you.
It would appear then there may be a low hanging fruit opportunity to raise line-speeds to above 70km/h.in the vicinity of Ans.
If the short route is slow the solution is to fix the short one not fix a longer one.
There is also a cross-border high speed line between Perpignan and Barcelona, except that it has fewer trains than Inverness-Thurso.
A good start would be a morning train from Perpignan to Barcelona and an evening one back, working up to hourly all day service.
In terms of this post I would have thought the best solution isn’t to build any new infrastructure but to run all-day hourly service. London-Edinburgh and London-Glasgow which both take over 4 hours to link smaller cities have all day hourly service with extra trains beyond that on the east coast line.
It’s also worth noting that Britain is definitely getting more overall rail passengers than the French. It looks like in 2022/23 we even drew ahead of the French’s pre-Corona numbers – https://dataportal.orr.gov.uk/media/2207/passenger-rail-usage-jan-mar-2023.pdf.
In 2023, Germany is ahead of its pre-corona numbers too and I believe that so is France. Intercity rail ridership has recovered fast.
Barcelona-Perpignan is an international line, yes, but Perpignan is not much of a city, and France is taking forever to complete the LGV link from there to Montpellier and the LGV Méditerranée.
Perpignan is significantly bigger than Inverness which has an urban area of 65k.
Plus theres potential through service from the whole of Northern Europe who want to go to spain by rail.
Actually the Catalan government already has that idea in their medium term plans:
Click to access Annex_1_Pla-dActuacio-FGC-2022-2026_20211126.pdf
(Page 101, point 5.5.3)
“El projecte consisteix en implementar serveis ferroviaris entre Lleida, Tarragona, Barcelona,
Girona, l’Aeroport de Girona, Perpignan, Narbonne i Montpellier i també Carcasonne i Toulouse.”
“The project consists in implementing rail services among Lleida, Tarragona, Barcelona, Girona, Airport of Girona, Perpignan, Narbonne, and also Carcassonne and Toulouse”.
It’s a curious case of competition happening, not among private companies, but among public ones.
Why can’t they just buy some old (or new) standard gauge trains that do 160km/h and just do it for the next timetable change?
It really honestly shouldn’t need a massive ultra complex plan to run an hourly service on an existing high speed line.
I think that’s what they’re trying to do, I’m guessing they need to finish the business case to decide how many trains a day, make the public tender for the trains, figure out the logistics (FGC doesn’t have other lines with passenger rail in shared networks), getting political supports, etc…
More details on the project: https://elmercantil.com/2019/01/28/fgc-trabaja-para-enlazar-en-velocidad-alta-las-cuatro-capitales-catalanas-y-occitania/
Support from European Union for this and nine more cross-border european rail projects: https://transport.ec.europa.eu/news-events/news/connecting-europe-train-10-eu-pilot-services-boost-cross-border-rail-2023-01-31_en
“Plus theres potential through service from the whole of Northern Europe who want to go to spain by rail.” <- For Barcelona it would make a lot of theoretical sense, given that the HSR line to France is under-used, and the airport is at its limits of capacity and enlargement, plus the climatic concerns. But on the other side, it's just a bit too far of everything to compete with the plane. It sits almost at the axis of the blue banana, with a huge amount of population at road distance between 1000km and 1500km, with annoying SNCF in the way. Therefore the current new projects are night trains like the Barcelona-Brussels-Amsterdam of the previous link, but I'm not sure they could make a serious dent to Ryanair, Easyjet, Vueling… My guess is that a lot of tourists may sacrifice travel time if they could get cheaper and more convenient travel, but night trains don't seem to be competing in price either.
There’s 20 million tourist trips from Britain alone to Spain.
Obviously there is very little data on how many people might do it, but if you can get even 1% of those people to go by train that’s material.
You can’t take a train to Ibiza, though. Or Shagaluf. Or Tenerife.
There’s a ferry from Barcelona to Ibiza or Mallorca/Menorca that a sensibly timed day train from London would meet without any ferry changes.
The way back is less good for Ibiza especially as the ferry is a day ferry, but still.
Once the Frankfurt – Basel corridor works are all complete (Rastatt tunnel, Mannheim – Frankfurt HSL) the German side will probably consider it fait accompli. Current best journey time (including a Karlsruhe call) is 3h39, so after all the works it should be the right side of 3h30, probably nearer 3h20. You could build a Strasbourg bypass to avoid a slow-running detour and bring journey times to around 3h. Strasbourg is big enough to support its own services to Paris, and Frankfurt – Lyon via Strasbourg should be a viable regular service once the French side completes their LGV Rhin-Rhone.
Let’s not write off Brussels – Cologne. It’s already not a bad route at the moment and an Aachen bypass should make a big difference. Do a Liege bypass as well if you feel you have to. All that said, those things would only have a business case if the UK joined the Schengen and London – Frankfurt trains became viable. If we get our crayons out I’d have London Brussels and Paris – Brussels both as half hourly, meeting at Brussels Midi together for a cross platform interchange; in each half hour one path goes to Amsterdam and the other to Cologne and Frankfurt, and swap in the other half hour. All routes get hourly direct services and half hourly opportunities to travel. The internationals would operate Brussels – Cologne non-stop; and there’d be a Brussels – Leuven – Liege – Aachen – Cologne half-hourly international RE to supplement the fast services.
Infrastructure wise – even the ‘Do Max’ package outlined above would be a fraction of the effort needed to blast a brand new route through the trickier terrains of Saarland. There are enough projects clinging precariously onto the German HSL pipeline (Hamburg-Hanover, Hanau-Eisenach, Munich-Kufstein, even Frankfurt-Mannheim itself). Getting all of them built in the foreseeable future will a miracle in itself, let’s not startle them with yet another grand proposal.
I’m not a fan of speeding up by bypassing, up thread I outlined a plan to cut 30 min off of Paris-Cologne without bypassing anything. Super slow zones around main stations aren’t inevitable, they can be fixed, and this has the added benefit of speeding up not only high speed trains but also suburban and regional trains.
You are constrained by physics. There are a fair few slow junctions and timetabling will be optimised for services that call between Ans and Chenee. Liege is a mixed traffic environment and if you create too big a speed differential between fast and slow services you take away capacity.
120km/h around the station and 140/160km/h not far out isn’t bad, and is probably what the track curvature can handle. Besides it does take about 10km to accelerate/decelerate between 0 and 300km/h. I’d say the gradation of speed limits around Liege-Guillemins is pretty much within the acceleration/deceleration curves of nearly all services. Also bear in mind that at major stations timings are based on the slowest line – platform routing with the most crossovers – you are not getting high-speed crossovers within station throats.
There’s not a cat in hell’s chance of improving line speeds through Aachen beyond the current 140/160km/h on a windy alignment through a built-up area. You are also at the mercy of RE1/RE9 which call at all stations between Aachen Hbf and Duren.
If you insist on ICEs/Thalys calling at both Liege and Aachen then there aren’t really any minutes to be saved. If you accept them skipping these two stations (with regional express infill services) then bypasses are the only realistic way of reducing journey times.
Of course there are minutes to be saved. Even if you’re making 3 stops in 250 km it’s possible speeds much higher than 140 km/h, which is what Brussels-Cologne is doing nowadays.
I imagine your plans to bypass Aachen involve prolonging the fast line from Cologne along the A4 and then following roughly the A44. Well, from near Eilendorf in Aachen it’s a 1.5-2 km tunnel + some surface tracks to join the A4, so you could already start accelerating to high speeds only 4.5 km after Aachen Hbf. No need to share tracks with the regional express until Düren. On the other side of Aachen you could build new high speed tracks for 7 km to join the Belgian high speed line, the only reason the high speed line ends so far from Aachen is because there’s an international border on the way…
In Liège a bypass of Ans would require a 3.5 km tunnel, which is still less tunneling than what was required for the Liège-German border LGV. Plus it would be nice if Eastbound trains actually went down to Guillemins at 120 km/h as OpenRailwayMaps thinks they do instead of the 70 km/h they do in practice.
London to Manchester averages 141km/h over 293km with 3 stops and a top speed of 200km/h, London to Bristol Parkway averages 145km/h over 178km with 2 stops and a top speed of 200km/h.
And they are both on 19th century routes the whole way.
Even on a new 300km/h capable route, if your train has a call at Liege-Guillemin it’d be travelling at about 140km/h around Ans anyway – it’s so close to Guillemin it’s well within the deceleration curve from 300 to 0 km/h. I highly doubt any significant minutes can be saved.
A proper Paris – Cologne or London – Frankfurt service need not and should not call at Liege or Aachen. Bypassing these stations would give you the biggest journey time savings (even on the best alignment a station stop still costs you about 6-7 minutes) and bypasses with minimal tunnelling are cheaper to build than tunnelling under settlements and into existing stations.
An A4-A44 alignment for an Aachen bypass. I was initially thinking skirting around the south of Stolberg, but I think the motorway alignment might be more straightforward.
Btw I was wrong about the average speed, it’s lower than that. Brussels-Cologne is 220 km, not 250, so the average speed is more like 125 km/h. It’s absurd to think there’s no way to significantly improve on that even while keeping the stops in Liège and Aachen.
Keep in mind that Aachen-Cologne is 57 km in 37 min on the timetable, a pitiful speed much lower than what the max speed on OpenRailwayMap suggests. There’s a lot of timetable padding, probably because of the extremely complicated operations in Köln Hbf (it’s common for trains to be parked 5 min or move at a snail’s speed as they approach the station). These are problems you need to solve anyway.
The 140 km/h zone starts 10 km away from Guillemins, any train can accelerate and decelerate much faster than that. For example Marne-La-Vallée is some 25 km away from Charles de Gaulle on the TGV, and the train still manages to reach more than 200 km/h (I forget if it’s 220 or 250) in between and sustain it for a while. Next time I’m on that line I should time how long it takes to decelerate to 0.
Are you sure that’s possible? The topography around Liège and Aachen is far from flat, and there’s quite a bit of tunneling in the high speed line that links them. Anyway building 30 km or so of new high speed bypasses is more expensive than 5 km of suburban tunnels.
A FLIRT reaches 160 km/h in 69 seconds and 2 km. Intercity trains have far lower initial acceleration, but most of the acceleration distance is dominated by performance at medium speed, where their high power-to-weight ratio means they accelerate just fine.
If you are only building 5km through Liege you are not going to touch Ans, which is on a curve so (I suspect) 140km/h is the maximum physically possible. How are you going to serve Liege-Guillemins if it mustn’t be bypassed? Are you going to plug into the existing station? Those tunnels portals either side aren’t going to cheap and are going to be highly disruptive. Or are you going to build a pair of sub-terranean 400m platforms? The costs would be through the roof. Anything that stops are Chenee and Angleur isn’t going to benefit from higher line speeds.
Bologna probably gives the best indication of the best speed profile either side of a station that can be achieved on a dedicated high-speed line. The end of 250km/h running starts approximately 6km west of Bologna Central platform mid-point. On a mixed railway approach into a general purpose station the length of speed limit gradation will be longer. Curvature, junctions, intermediate stops all contribute.
To get around the existing low speed limits around Guillemins you really need a new line from as far west as the HSL diverges from the motorway (Kemexhe), to around Herve. A possible routing would be through the unbuilt corridor north of the E40, a short tunnel under Liers, then alongside the E40 between Milmort and Herve. Other than getting under Liers, I don’t think there’s anything more significant than earthworks territory.
I think it’s unlikely that we will join Schengen, and even if we did channel tunnel regulations still require bags to be X Rayed. Plus getting rid of those regulations is probably politically unviable.
Still the passport checks could be done on board which would make serving destinations beyond the core ones of Brussels and Paris a lot more flexible.
Given you can work on the train and it’s better for the environment I’d expect London-Frankfurt or London-Cologne to get a reasonable market share regardless. Difficult to know exactly what until someone makes the effort and gives it a go!
Unless there’s a political sea-change the Home Office will not permit passport checks being done on-board. I think human rights conventions are such that as long as an asylum seeker is on land then the recipient country has a duty of care, so an asylum seeker without a passport can’t just be returned on a next train out of St Pancras (you can’t argue they are ‘air side’). I’m talking Home Office language I know, but that’s the political environment we live in. If we can move away from that political environment then we’d be pretty close to joining Schengen.
Having emergency border stops at Calais would probably represent unacceptable loss of service quality.
I find the Chunnel regulations requiring security checks explanation an odd one – there’s no security check for Le Shuttle.
For as long as there is even one of security checks or passport checks then the economics fore Cologne and Frankfurt services evaporate. It’s not possible to have a segregated area and platforms at the highly constrained Cologne Hbf, and even Frankfurt looks iffy.
Britain’s border is with France, not Uganda; the number of extra asylum seekers who’d enter the country if it were in Schengen would not even be noticed – the only reason it’s noticed now is that the border controls have made it into a huge line (less huge now that nominal incomes in the UK are not so good; the best strategy to reduce immigration is to be poor).
Not strictly or legally true. Schengen means the border is all over the place across 27 countries some of whom may be quite happy if they thought they could get rid of some of their own refugees by placing them on an express train to Blighty. Like Texas and Florida in the US but buses.
It’s why they insist on passport control by Brit control officers in Brussels, and will do the same anywhere else outside France where a Eurostar takes on pax if it is not going to stop at Lille. Stopping at Lille and forcing all pax to disembark with their luggage and queue for an hour shuffling thru absurd British Immigration control kills HSR and pisses pax off so that next time they’ll consider flying, or just not bother with the UK (which is what is happening, even to French who don’t have to go thru much different post-Brexit –well, they have to have passports not just identity cards which is killing the school visit schemes).
Remember that “immigration out of control” was what drove the Brexit vote. The weird thing is that while they have reduced immigration from 300k mostly from Europe, overall immigration has risen to 600k (mostly from Commonwealth countries). But then there has never been anything rational about the Brits anti-EU stance. That continues today and the only thing that has reversed the sentiment about leaving/remaining is purely economic.
Every single country in the Union shares open borders with Germany this way. And yeah, FAZ is turning immigrants into a social problem, and regrettably so are the otherwise-good Zeit and SZ, but Germany has full employment and the fascists aren’t even talking about immigration but rather about heat pumps (apparently, air conditioning is a communist plot now).
They’ve been watching the videos from people who install an undersized heat pump and then complain that it doesn’t heat as well as their good ol’ boiler. Goes good with the videos about how electric cars will make the electric grid meltdown and dunkelflaute!!! that you won’t be able to watch TV if the wind dies down.
The EU is a relatively young project, and culturally European nations still look inwards – cross-border activities are still much lower than inter-state activities in the US. Things are improving, but from a low base.
National governments definitely still disproportionally look inwards. EU directives consider international travel not a social necessity but a purely economic good, so long-distance international rail operates mainly as purely commercial services. National governments, as shareholders of Thalys and other government-owned operators adopt an aggressive profit-maximising model rather than social value maximising and financially break-even model, and the governments are quite happy getting the dividends. Let’s face it, most EU national governments are under some sort of fiscal strain. I’m not sure if EU Regulation 1370 explicitly forbids international services being part of Passenger Service Obligation (PSO) contracts – I’d be surprised if it did. Is the NS Amsterdam – Brussels service part of the Dutch national PSO contract, or operated on an open access basis?
Now, I’d like international services to be part of PSOs, with the European Commission overseeing a Europe-wide takt. My London/Paris – Amsterdam/Frankfurt start network would be part of a PSO contract. The European Commission and Parliament are good at setting macro-economic policies and passing directives, but they are a long way from acquiring the competency and political mandate to oversee the day-to-day nitty gritties of railway operations. Member states are in the main also a long way from being able to form long-term sustainable joint franchising authorities.
I don’t think TGVs work on the basis of PSOs. They work on the basis of, the SNCF of the early 1980s decided as a matter of strategy to charge the same fares on the TGVs as on the slow trains; I think the rationale was social, and perhaps political in the sense of avoiding creating a negative impression of trains as belonging only to the rich (which is what would later happen with Eurostar and Thalys), but another rationale on hindsight is to avoid incentivizing passengers to take higher-cost-to-provide, inferior service like slower trains. In Italy, the way it works is that Trenitalia’s PSOs are for peripheral intercity lines, to places like Ancona, rather than anything participating in the Freccia system.
I bring up Paris-Frankfurt precisely because neither government uses it as a vehicle for surplus extraction. They charge fares that are mostly the same as for domestic trains, and run semi-decent end-to-end frequency by TGV standards (if not ICE ones). This is why just upgrading the infrastructure on this route would be so powerful – it would not require SNCF to throw away its entire management and culture, which it won’t unless it feels like it’s truly being bypassed by other people (and it won’t until Germany and the UK build solid high-speed rail infrastructure). It would require changes in Germany, but these are changes that can actually happen – high-speed rail here is happening, albeit very slowly, and with an activist community that keeps looking down on France and not understanding why France doesn’t find Germany obviously superior.
I’m pretty sure TGV is profitable – or it’s supposed to be profitable under Fourth Rail Package rules, as anything that requires a subsidy should be subject to open tender. It could well be that on domestic TGV routes they only seek a break-even profit level.
I don’t have real data, so I’m happy to be corrected – I did some searches for Frankfurt – Paris (TGV/ICE) and Cologne – Paris (Thalys) for between a week and two months ahead, and found the pricing on the two routes to be fairly similar. Frankfurt – Paris seemed noticeably more expensive than Geneva – Paris for some reason. I’m not sure it’s entirely true that Paris – Frankfurt isn’t being used for surplus extraction.
As I’ve said, once the Basel-Frankfurt works are complete (there’s also Mannheim-Karlsruhe new line being planned but at an earlier development stage) there will be respectable journey times and capacity, and we’ll see what an ‘existing TGV/ICE commercial model’ service level will be.
The biggest problem with your HSL through Saarland is you are asking German taxpayers (it could get some EU money notwithstanding) to fund a route and suffer the disruptions for what they’d most certainly (and justifiably) consider to be duplicative infrastructure.
From Frankfurt’s perspective surely faster times to Berlin (particularly on the Erfurt-Fulda section) would be a much higher priority than Paris. At present it takes about the same time to reach each capital (just under 4 hours). I don’t have hard data, but having done both stretches on many occasions, I would say ridership to Berlin is several multiples of that to Paris. So cutting Berlin times would be a lot more beneficial than parallel attempts on the Paris side.
Of course they should do both, but at present HSR is proceeding at snail’s pace in Germany, so I would like to see them pull off at least one ambitious project in a reasonable timeframe, and I don’t think there are many higher priorities than Erfurt-Fulda.
Alas the plans for Hanau to Eisenach are a pretty paltry affair… And then Halle – Berlin ought to be a proper segregated high-speed line without the REs and ICEs getting in each other’s ways.
They pulled off Halle-Bamberg, they can build multiple segments at a time and not do American-style phasing. The limiting factor here is not planning capacity, it’s the combination of unwillingness to invest in rail on the center-right and moral revulsion to fast trains among the Greens.
The Turin-Lyon high speed rail link seems to fit this bill, when the project is eventually finished in… when is it 2032 now? It seems like this project has gotten a bit controversial due to the high costs, but will become an integral part of the European international high speed network once completed.
Re: Torino—Lyon: I can not begin quantify this, but versus Paris—Frankfurt might there be lower Romance/Germanic linguistic trans-national ridership malus?
To what extent does the causation for high costs run the other way: surplus extraction? Obviously, building a long base tunnel deep under mountains isn’t inherently cheap, and I don’t think ~€500m/km is a super outlier. I don’t know enough about the objections to the project, but it seems plausible that some of the objections to it, like local disruptions, could motivate it.
Having a good connection between France and Germany is going to be politically difficult, at least on the french side. Cross-border projects like Lyria work because the French dominate (the trains are built by Alstom and maintained by SNCF) and any project that involves abroad will probably cause strong push back, like the Lyon-Turin line.
To handle the Geneva S-Bahn network (Léman-Express), they had to create a schizophrenic monster that pretends this is one project, but underneath, there are two two companies, two sets of incompatible trains, with different drivers, different security procedures, and incompatible information systems.
Isn’t that the way Paris RER-B worked for ages? Northern section was RATP and southern section was SNCF, with even a change of drivers at the middle for every train and different signalling IIRC. Eventually at some point–like 20 or 30 years–it became fully RATP. If it works, I guess the important thing is that it gets the line going, rather than cat-fight and delay for ages or forever. There may not be enough political commitment to force the thing at the beginning but once up and running, there would be immense political pressure to resolve it if it began imploding.
Hmm. What if SNCF offered to fund the Paris-Frankfurt line upgrade in the same way they did the LGV to Bordeaux, ie. as a PPP with bits of funding from Paris and of course the EU (because it is a trans-europa express line; they contributed to the Bordeaux line). Then SNCF runs it to repay the loans etc.
(Northern section was SNCF, southern section was RATP.)
The line is still split, but as of maybe 10 years ago, they no longer change drivers.
And SNCF has no interest and will never have interest in being responsible for a high-speed rail project in Germany. This is on Germany and on Germany’s pro-rail political community.
I don‘r see France paying for infrastructure in Germany without nasty noises from the right wing parties. I don’t see Germany (and Siemens) to be happy with a line exclusively exploited by SNCF with Alstom train sets. And even if France committed to building the tracks, who would trust them after they effectively bailed out on the Turin Lyon tunnel.
At the end of the day HSR is expensive business. Paris – Frankfurt will have a high-quality route via Strasbourg and Karlsruhe – yes, it’s on a T-shaped route, but T-shaped or Y-shaped high-speed networks are extremely common. While some corridors are still waiting for their first proper high-speed line, cutting off a T just isn’t going to be on the agenda. LGV Picardie still remains a pipe-dream.
Karlsruhe-Frankfurt isn’t even planned to be particularly fast…
The right-wing parties in France are making noise over how unemployment is too low at this point; the ones in Germany are making noise over how heat pumps are so bad it’s acceptable to have “Hang the Greens” signs at protests. Things happen anyway.
Alon, off topic but I wondered if you saw this article:
https://www.propublica.org/article/dot-rejected-truck-side-guards-trucking-lobbyists-safety
While one angle is corruption and potential bribery (or a future lobbying job), in my experience working with these agencies, the real issue you find exposed here is the extreme deference by middle managers because they live in extreme fear of making someone important angry. Its a constant cover your ass situation, which extends to mega projects in the US. Then combine that with their ability to veto anything and everything and…
“Shashi Kuppa, a career official with NHTSA, …..concluded the expense was not worth it, given the low number of lives saved.”
If one was to draw a straight line from Paris to Frankfurt, it’d pass through Luxembourg. It’s a shame that the actual TGV line ends up going below Metz and that there is no direct rail links from Reims to Luxembourg. It would be a nice show of international high speed rail to have a direct Paris – Reims – Luxembourg – Mainz – Frankfurt line. But I guess Luxembourg is too small of a destination population wise to merit better than it’s current low-speed spur of the TGV from Metz.
If I were building a European high-speed rail network from scratch, then yeah, Paris-Frankfurt would be a very strong line, and it should go through Luxembourg. But two-thirds of the line already exists, on the French side, connecting to Saarbrücken instead.