French and Italian opponents of the Lyon-Turin railway line project gather on Saturday in Haute-Maurienne. The event was banned by the Savoy prefecture due to the risk of overflow. 2,000 police and gendarmes will be deployed.
On the heights of Villarodin-Bourget (Savoie) Philippe Delhomme observes with spite the construction site of the new Lyon-Turin railway line. “Everything seems very bucolic. And then all of a sudden, it’s amazing because you have a wetland in front of you, or rather, it was a wetland”describes the co-president of the association Living and acting in Maurienne. Always opposed to this project, Philippe Delhomme pleads for an alternative.
“I think that with the existing one, we have plenty of enough to do all the necessary transport. And besides, should we increase transport? That’s the question.”
Philippe Delhommefranceinfo
Gilles Margueron, Mayor Villarodin-Bourget, assures that this construction site has negative consequences for his municipality. “The first big impact was the water. The springs dried up. Then there’s everything that goes with a big construction site: dust, noise…” According to the aedile, “People are starting to realize that there are things that are damaged or broken and that we won’t be able to repair them. For water, we managed to repair them by going to find sources higher up, by altitude. But it will be necessary to look for it where the water, the day when it will have really siphoned? asks the chosen one.
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“Erase the disadvantages of the historical line”
The base tunnel should be put into service in 2032, according to TELT (Tunnel Euralpin Lyon Turin), the company in charge of building the cross-border tunnel. It will link Suse in Piedmont to Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne in Savoie, over 57.5 kilometres. “This line, it also erases the disadvantages of the historical line”, argues Philippe Rollet, mayor of Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne and fervent supporter of the project. He points out that the current railway line is “steeply sloping”. As a result, “We are often forced to put a machine at the back of the trains to help climb to Modane which is 1000 meters above sea level. These constraints do not allow the operation of modern freight trains.
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For the defenders of the project, the Lyon-Turin line will make it possible to effectively unclog the valleys in Savoie by transferring a million trucks to the rails. “I lived through the Mont-Blanc disaster. In one day, we doubled the traffic: we had 2,000 trucks a day, we ended up with 4,000 trucks a day”remembers François Chemin, mayor of Fourneaux in the Maurienne valley. “My commitment to piggybacking and massive postponement dates from that moment. Since then, I have not deviated”, he says. To date, 20% of the base tunnel has been dug. But the question of the access roads to this tunnel on the French side has not been settled and this is a reason for concern for the supporters, while on the Italian side, the work is progressing more quickly.
Lyon-Turin line: opponents and supporters at the microphone of Mathilde Imberty
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