The founder of insubordinate France has claimed that rail freight under the historic Mont-Cenis tunnel has been divided by seven and finds it “absurd”. True or false ?
Calm returned this Monday morning in the Maurienne valley, after a marked demonstration of tension during the weekend. A dozen movements, including the Uprisings of the Earth, had called to mobilize against the digging of a new tunnel in the Alps for the future Lyon-Turin railway line accused of having an impact on the environment.
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Like several left-wing political figures, Jean-Luc Mélenchon has expressed his opposition to this new tunnel. “There is already a railway linking Lyon to Turin and it has just been modernizedrecalled the founder of insubordinate France on Sunday June 18 on BFM-TV . Now, figureyou that this way that exists, now we put seven times less train than before. It’s absurd.” Is this number correct?
Lyon-Turin line: “It’s a big useless project” says Jean-Luc Mélenchon (@JLMelenchon) pic.twitter.com/gMagF8yoe8
– BFM Politics (@BFMolitique) June 18, 2023
Traffic divided by three under the Mont-Cenis tunnel
This is false, Jean-Luc Mélenchon inflates the figures. In this regard, data from the Swiss Federal Statistical Office on transalpine goods transport, collected since the 1980s, are a reference. They are not in number of trains, but in millions of tons of goods. According to the table of this office listing the traffic of goods through the Alps according to the routes, rail freight has indeed decreased under the Mont-Cenis tunnel over the past forty years, but it has been divided by three and not by seven.
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In 1984, the first year of the surveys, 8.1 million tonnes of goods passed through the rails via the Mont-Cenis tunnel, compared to 2.7 million tonnes in 2021, i.e. exactly three times less. At the same time, the share of rail in the transport of goods between France and Italy in general – through this tunnel, but also through that of Ventimiglia – has also been divided by three, from 19.9% in 1999 to 7.4% in 2020, according to the annual report Observation and analysis of transalpine goods transport flows of the European Commission and the Swiss Federal Office of Transport for the year 2020.
At the same time, the volume of goods transported from France to Italy, rail and road combined, has rather stagnated, falling from around 50 million tonnes in 1999 to 45 million tonnes in 2021, according to this report and the Transport file. of goods across the Alps from the Alpine Territories Agency and the Savoie department. Mathematically, on the contrary, the share of transport by heavy goods vehicles has therefore increased.
Strong Italian “security constraints”
Contacted by franceinfo, the Ministry of Transport explains that “the number of trains is limited due to traffic restrictions imposed in the historic tunnel. Indeed, due to less strict safety standards than for recent tunnels during its construction, the tunnel’s intervention and safety plan imposes strong operating constraints in order to limit the risk of accidents.Thus, if the historic tunnel effectively allowed the circulation of approximately 10 million tonnes in the 1980s, the safety constraints in place today prevent it from being able to reach such levels”.
A note from SNCF Réseau dating from 2018 highlights the safety problems posed by this tunnel built between the 1850s and 1870s, 13 km long in the mountains, without any evacuation to the outside, and in which Italian safety rules , more restrictive than the French ones, apply since the tunnel is managed by the Rete ferroviaria italiana (RFI), the Italian equivalent of SNCF Réseau.
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These Italian standards “prohibit, in the design of train paths, the crossing and pursuit of passenger trains by trains carrying dangerous goods, as well as dangerous goods trains between them. (…) Although work to improve the safety of this tunnel have been entered, it cannot reach the standards of current tunnels, imposed by the new rules in this area (presence of a refuse accessible from the outside, or of a separate tube that can serve as a refuge, dimensions of the sidewalks for evacuation of people).
This considerably limits the possibilities of further exploiting the tunnel. “RFI thus indicates that by integrating the constraint of non-crossing of trains, the capacity of the tunnel is 62 trains per day in total (freight, passengers and technical traffic). The fact that two trains of different nature (freight and passenger ) cannot circulate at the same time reduces this total by eight circulations”, continues the note. In other words, the theoretical capacity of the Mont-Cenis tunnel is 54 trains per day, slightly more than the forty that currently circulate there.
However, according to the Ministry of Transport, it would be impossible to increase traffic under the current Mont-Cenis tunnel instead of digging a new tunnel. “The new Lyon-Turin tunnel is intended to transfer up to a million of these heavy goods vehicles to rail, he explained to franceinfo. If we wanted to tip a million heavy goods vehicles towards the historic tunnel, that would represent 15 million tonnes to pass through the tunnel, an even greater quantity than in the 1980s and the tunnel is therefore not in capacity. to be able to endure.”