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Francois Hollande's TGV vanity project is on a high-speed railway to nowhere

   Once the envy of the world, France’s TGV network is mired in
   controversy – not least because of the President’s plans to extend the
   track to his political heartland. John Lichfield, in Paris, says the
   whole debate offers a warning to the UK and its HS2 project
     * John Lichfield
     * Friday 26 December 2014 22:40 {{^moreThanTen}}
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   President François Hollande faces an agonising decision in the new year
   – not about France’s many problems but about one of its great
   successes, the high-speed train.

   As Britain finally prepares to climb aboard the railway revolution
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   Mr Hollande must decide by mid-January whether to give the go-ahead for
   a new high-speed line which would cut journey times to his own
   political fiefdom in a thinly populated region of south-western France.

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   The President has pledged privately to local politicians that the
   €1.8bn Poitiers-Limoges line will be built. The French state watchdog
   has concluded that the project is a high-speed branch line and
   economically absurd. The government must make a decision by 12 January.

   Argument is already raging about an iconoclastic report from the Court
   of Auditors – the country’s financial watchdog – which suggests that
   all existing high-speed lines in France are losing money if the debt on
   their building costs is taken into consideration.

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   nationwide bus network. At the same time, opposition is growing from
   wine producers, farmers and militant environmentalists to well-advanced
   plans for two further high-speed lines in the south of the country.

   The decisions taken by the French government early next year will be
   closely watched in Britain. Opponents of the HS2 high-speed line to the
   Midlands and the North will seize on any sign that Paris is dismantling
   its ambitious plans to double, or even triple, its 2,000km-network of
   high speed lines by the middle of the century.

   Defenders of HS2 will, however, point to the many successes of
   high-speed rail travel in France and beyond.

   More than two billion passengers have been carried on high-speed lines
   in France since September 1981, without a single death or serious
   injury. The express train, once regarded as a defunct form of
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   plane on five continents.

   High-speed lines are in use in China and Russia and planned in the US,
   Saudi Arabia, Argentina and Morocco. A Europe-wide network is taking
   shape in France, Germany, Benelux, Spain and Italy.
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   Although Japan pioneered high-speed railway lines from the 1960s, it
   was France that captured the world’s imagination in 1981 by developing
   a robust, 150mph – and now 200mph – train capable of travelling very
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   The court suggested that the French network had already been allowed to
   sprawl too far and too fast. Of six high-speed lines studied, none had
   reached its promised target for passengers carried, the court said.

   Although the train services themselves were profitable, no French
   high-speed line – not even the pioneer line from Paris to Lyon – could
   be said to be covering its total capital investment and maintenance
   costs. Worse, the court said, the claimed wider economic benefits of
   high-speed rail had not fully materialised.

   Some of these conclusions are disputed by the government, by the state
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   profitable? Or new airports?”

   “All high-speed rail services in France are profitable. It is only when
   you include the whole capital cost – the money invested not just by the
   railways but also national and local government and Brussels – that you
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   infrastructure arm of French railways – the equivalent of Network Rail
   – has a mountain of €35bn of accumulated debt. Most of this comes from
   its share of building the new high-speed lines.

   To service the debt, it has been forced to increase steeply its “toll
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   Even Barbara Dalibard, head of passenger services at the SNCF, accepts
   this point. “After 30 years of success, the more we extend the
   high-speed lines, the less profitable they are,” she said. “What the
   Court of Auditors says is that we have reached the limits of expansion
   of the system. We agree with that.”

   There are lessons here for Britain – but not necessarily simple ones.
   HS2, linking London with the vast Midlands and northern conurbations,
   should, in theory, be ideal commercial territory for high-speed rail
   travel.

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