Railcoop - French cooperative targets Bordeaux–Lyon open-access from 2022

[whole diary]

[stuving]

From International Rail Journal:

Currently passengers travelling between the two cities – which are separated by 556km by road – require a change in Paris. This journey takes 5h 26min on the fastest TGV connection, with a 1h 19min connection in Paris.

The company is planning to offer three trains per day via Libourne, Périgueux, Limoges, Guéret, Montluçon, Saint-Germain-des-Fossés and Roanne and is proposing a 6h 47 min journey time.

While considerably longer than the 5h 30min car journey and the equivalent trip by TGV, Railcoop hopes that time will be offset by onboard services and greater comfort. The trains are set to feature a children’s play area, catering and storage for luggage, skis and surfboards.

The lowest priced ticket for the journey will be set at €38 and pre-Covid-19 projections were for 690,000 passengers per year to use the service. A study by Systra confirmed the strong potential for the route and Railcoop hopes to attract motorists and benefit from the curtailing of domestic air travel in France.

Founded in November 2019 as France’s first cooperative society of collective interest for railways (SCIC), Railcoop says it has confirmed its intentions to France’s Regulatory Transport Authority (ART) on June 9, which will investigate whether the planned service conflicts with an existing public service. A decision of whether to grant the operator the necessary train paths will be confirmed by September 2021.

The company is also targeting the introduction of freight trains from the second half of 2021 and hosted a meeting of around 30 companies in February interested in pursuing alternative logistics.

A sticking point for the operator might be the €1.5m share capital, the minimum threshold for obtaining a railway operating license. The cooperative must recruit 3000 members and to date, according to Capital, has raised 10% of the sum from 360 members.

France is set to open its rail market to competition for the first time from December 2021. The Ministry of Transport published a tender in January for the operation of Intercities services between Nantes and Bordeaux and Nantes and Lyon on the Balance of Territory (TET) inter-city network, currently operated by SNCF Mobility from the beginning of 2022, a move that was welcomed by Transdev.

However, another potential operator to compete with SNCF, FlixMobility, confirmed its intention to postpone plans to enter the French market in April due to high access charges in the country.

There's more detail on their plans on their web site; the latest move being a formal application - the first step in a long process. Whether their date of end-2022 is feasible is open to question; obviously getting the trains will be a key factor. They are talking about leasing six Alstom Regiolis/Coradia liner (like the new Intercités ones), but reducing the maintenance cost by being a smaller more flexible organisation that SNCF.

[eightonedee]

I can think of a few Alstom Coradias that might be going cheap soon......

[Jamsdad]

Very interesting development. The Non-TGV Intercities have become the Cinderella of the French rail network and this could be the lifeline they need.

[Hal]

Railcoop has just published an update on its projects on its website www.railcoop.fr

Its first aim is to launch a freight service operating out of Toulouse in mid-2021. Then it aims to restart passenger trains from Bordeaux to Lyon, with a target date of June 2022.
It says it is already in talks to buy some second-hand rolling stock for this line.

After that it wants to run two other lines: from Toulouse to Rennes in Brittany, and from Lyon to Thionville in the northeast (near the Luxembourg border).

Longer-term Railcoop wants to run long-distance sleeper trains.

[stuving]

I wonder how that will look next month! There was a news item on F2 Tuesday night based on a report to be submitted to parliament in March, coupled to what the boss of SNCF said to a parliamentary committee in December. I've not found anything more about it - no-one else has picked it up, and I'm not sure what the report is (or even what a rapport d'état ought to be). The news is on line at francetvinfo (item starts about 3:20), and this is their summary:

Le train, le moyen de transport de l'avenir ?

Un rapport d'État concernant les moyens de transport les plus polluants devrait être présentés aux parlementaires en mars. Comment concurrencer l’avion et la voiture tout en désenclavant les territoires les plus isolés ? La solution passe peut-être par le ferroviaire.

Apres le TGV, la France pourrait aiguiller sa politique ferroviaire vers les trains interrégionaux. Selon un rapport d’État, les grandes lignes entre régions pourraient faire leur retour en force, avec par exemple la création d’une ligne entre Toulouse (Haute-Garonne) et Lyon (Rhône), en passant par Avignon (Vaucluse). "Ce serait le top, c’est sûr, témoigne un usager. Moi il m’arrive de rester en transit à la gare de Nîmes (Gard) trois heures". Faire Toulouse-Avignon en train impose pour le moment une correspondance de 23 minutes à Nîmes, pour 3h33 de voyage au total, contre 3h20 en voiture. Le rapport propose ainsi de prolonger la ligne Bordeaux-Marseille jusqu’à Nice (Alpes-Maritimes), ou de créer des axes Toulouse-Lyon, Metz-Grenoble ou Nantes-Lille.
Nouvel aménagement des territoires

De nouvelles rames coûteraient 170 millions d’euros. "C’est une nouvelle conception de l’aménagement des territoires qui prend en compte l’ensemble de ces petites villes qui structurent la ruralité et qui aujourd’hui n’ont plus que des petits TER pour aller à leur chef-lieu de département, mais plus du tout de relations interrégionales", explique Joël Giraud, secrétaire d’État chargé de la ruralité.

It's not clear whether they are literally talking about building new "classique" lines, just to avoid a 23 minute wait. Or are they just proposing new services, which is hardly such a big deal. And as to whether small towns really would get a range of inter-regional services stopping there ... well, how? Somewhere in a report about the impact of a region (Hauts-d-France in this case) taking full control over minor lines and getting another contractor than SNCF to run them, I read that better, longer, services than current TERs would be possible by stopping at fewer places. True, but of course you can't please all the people, can you?