(Paris) After Paris-Nice, here are Paris-Lourdes and Paris-Vienne: despite the attacks of COVID-19, night trains are returning to our stations, offering an eco-friendly alternative option to the plane, subsidized by the public authorities .
The click goes back in France to a speech by Emmanuel Macron on July 14, 2020, the president announcing that he wanted to “massively redevelop” night trains.
The government stimulus plan has provided an envelope to put Paris-Nice and Paris-Tarbes-Lourdes back on track (a link that will be extended in the summer to the Basque coast). The first train left at the end of May, the second returns on Sunday evening.
And while the government intends (r) to open a dozen night connections by 2030, Prime Minister Jean Castex recently indicated that the next on the list would be Paris-Aurillac. No date, for the moment.
Tuesday morning, another night train will make a very remarkable entrance to Gare de l’Est, in Paris: a convoy from Vienna, operated by Austrian railways ÖBB.
In recent years, the company has become the champion of pan-European night trains, building up a network that is expanding every year. It recently agreed with the SNCF and the German Deutsche Bahn and the Swiss Federal Railways (CFF) to complete the canvas, the Paris-Vienna being also opened three years ahead of forecasts.
The figures for reservations for night-time connections are good despite the pandemic, indicates the director of Voyages SNCF Alain Krakovitch.
“There is the rise of the ecological dimension”, he says, recalling that “the trains were empty five years ago”.
Night trains have been victims of the development of the TGV network, the abolition of military service, insufficient investments, works, strikes, delays, lack of comfort … and of course competition from low-cost airlines. price.
Former SNCF boss Guillaume Pepy felt that times had changed and that travelers no longer wanted to feel strangers’ feet in their compartment.
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PHOTO ANNE-CHRISTINE POUJOULAT, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE ARCHIVES
An SNCF employee on the Paris-Nice train
In fact, the public company has long neglected its night trains. A report nearly completed them in 2015, pointing to the fact that each passenger cost the taxpayer more than 100 euros.
However, two lines have survived, deemed “essential due to the absence of a sufficient alternative offer for the territories concerned”: from Paris to Briançon – which will reopen on Sunday after renovation -, and from Paris to Rodez, Latour-de- Carol and Cerbère.
Times have changed, and travelers should gain some comfort with a renovation program for cars, which date from the 1970s-1980s.
In any case, we will have to invest if we want to run all the trains announced. A government report published in the spring estimated the sum needed to purchase the necessary (new) cars and locomotives at around 1.5 billion euros.
Not to mention the operating deficit which would, in France, be borne by the State.
“The window of opportunity is rather now” to launch the night trains, “but the acquisition of new equipment will take time”, points out François Guénard, rail expert at the Roland Berger cabinet.
“You will need to have a good customer experience if you want to make these connections sustainable. We can assume that consumer expectations are a little higher than twenty or thirty years ago, ”he notes.
SNCF nods. As well as a new company called Midnight Trains, which wants to launch “hotels on rail” from 2023 between Paris and European metropolises.
“We are in the home stretch for the acquisition of our trains and the financing,” says its manager Adrien Aumont, co-founder of the crowdfunding platform KissKissBankBank.
The fact remains that COVID-19 has claimed victims. The Italian company Trenitalia has abandoned its Paris-Venice and the Russian railways RJD have not taken over the Paris-Moscow.
Rare private actor to run night trains without subsidies, the Swedish company Snälltåget (the nice train) notably connects Stockholm to Berlin. But its French owner, Transdev, put it up for sale.