2023-06-12 11:41:49
Renfe it already has all the necessary permits to start operating in France. The company, as LA RAZÓN published last week, was pending a final administrative procedure to be able to launch its commercial activities in the French country, complete the registration of your branch in Lyon, process that has just finished. As reported today by the public railway operator, its new branch, located next to Lyon Part Dieu Station, already has permission from the French authority to start its commercial activity “imminently”.
The opening of this branch is a key step for the full operation of Renfe in this country. According to the Lyon commercial register, Renfe is registered for “the provision of rail passenger transport services, both nationally and internationally, the intermediation in the provision of any tourist service, the organization, provision and/or marketing of trips packages or tourist packages, travel packages or tourist products, as well as the provision of other complementary services or activities or related to rail transport”.
In practice, this step completes the administrative process necessary for the full operation of Renfe in France, priority market in the company’s internationalization strategywhere the most immediate milestone will be the commissioning of the new AVE trains that will connect Barcelona-Girona-Figueres Vilafant with Lyon and Madrid-Zaragoza – Camp de Tarragona – Barcelona – Girona – Figueres Vilafant with Marseille, with numerous stations in French territory such as Narbonne, Montpellier, Nimes, Avignon or Aix-en-Provence, as explained by Renfe.
The company It has not yet specified the date on which it will begin to provide its services and it has limited itself to announcing that in the next few days it will open the sale for this service.
The corridors to Lyon and Marseille are Renfe’s first step to compete in the French high-speed market. Both corridors were operated by the Spanish company in collaboration with the French state company SNCF. However, in February last year, the French company announced its intention not to renew the agreement to maintain the Elipsos joint venture once its contract expired in December last year. SNCF assured that the company lost 100 million euros in ten years and that only the Barcelona-Paris route, which began to operate alone last December, can make money. From the Spanish operator, however, they assure that, until the pandemic, the service “was profitable” and that their studies indicate that, under normal conditions, it will generate benefits. Otherwise, they add, the Spanish companies would not have considered continuing to operate it alone.
After it seems like a matter of weeks to set foot in France through the corridors of Lyon and Marseille, Renfe is now working on its main objective, which is none other than to reach Paris, the most profitable line of the French high-speed network. The public company has been mired in administrative procedures with the French authorities for years to achieve this, although still without success. France committed itself after the last bilateral summit with Spain held in January to facilitate the arrival of high-speed trains from Renfe to Paris before the end of the year. However, from the operator they assure that they continue to have many difficulties. For example, to approve rolling stock. As published by LA RAZÓN in its edition of March 29, Talgo informed Renfe that the SNCF division in charge of French railway infrastructures -the equivalent of the Spanish Adif- has made a maintenance workshop available to the manufacturer in which basic maintenance tasks are not possible, such as the wheels, of the S-106, the Avril, with which Renfe intends to operate the Parisian line. Given this, these sources add, Talgo is being forced to bring its trains from France to Spain, specifically to its workshops in Barcelona, in order to carry out these elementary maintenance tasks, which delays the entire approval process.
From France, however, rejects such accusations.. He French Ambassador to Spain, Jean-Michel Casaassured in April that the delays in the launch of Renfe in France are due to the signaling system that the Spanish company has wanted to introduce in the country with its trains and that it is not compatible with the French network system. «I don’t want to criticize Renfe, but they complain a lot that there are obstacles, and these are the result of some technical choices, the main problem being the train signaling system that they wanted to introduce in France and that is not compatible with the system installed in the line from Paris to Lyon”, as he assured in an interview with Ep. The diplomat argued that Ouigo has also had to delay its operations in Andalusia for the same reason, because the security system on that line is not compatible with the European system that equips its trains.
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