By Chris King • Published: 07 Jul 2023 • 16:50 • 2 minutes read
Image of trains in France. Credit: Florian Pépellin/Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
The French government announced an initiative this Friday, July 7, inviting travellers to use the country’s train system more often during the Summer months.
A total of 200,000 tickets will go on sale for July and August at just €19. They will be for travel on the main Intercity lines, excluding SNCF TGV.
Clément Beaune, the Minister of Transport, unveiled the offer this Friday from the Gare d’Austerlitz, from where the start of the summer holidays is traditionally given. The measure will be financed by the State, which subsidises these trains.
Tickets go on sale this Friday and will only be available until Saturday, July 15 only, for journeys until August 31. They are for use on lines including Paris-Toulouse, Bordeaux-Marseille, Nantes-Lyon or even the Paris-Briançon night train.
As Beaune pointed out, the Intercity trains are much slower than the TGVs, but they are: ‘lifestyles, real lines that must be rehabilitated today’, he explained.
According to the minister, this ‘popular offer’ should make it possible to ‘halve’ the cost of tickets. Something to make holidaymakers think. ‘If the operation goes well, we will continue it’, he promised.
This announcement comes at a time when the debate on the high cost of the train resurfaced. A survey published in April showed that for two out of five French people, the train was too expensive.
A massive 57 per cent of respondents said that the first measure needing to be introduced to encourage them to take this means of transport more often would be the implementation of pricing policies, which are more advantageous.
The Minister of Transport promised a ‘general mobilisation to act on prices. I know that we still have to make efforts. The SNCF does it, the State accompanies it, and the regions do too. The next project is to simplify all that’.
Among the measures going in this direction is the creation before next summer of a single pass for young people on regional trains, similar to Germany, Beaune noted.
In the meantime, the SNCF revealed that its trains for this summer are not all complete. At least 45 per cent of the tickets are still available on the long-distance TGV and Intercités journeys, they explained.
In June, Alain Krakovitch, the director of mainline activities for SNCF, confidently predicted that the company expected a record summer in July and August of 2023. ‘The trains will be fuller than in 2019, which was the best year for TGVs’, he assured, according to lesechos.fr.
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Originally from Wales, Chris spent years on the Costa del Sol before moving to the Algarve where he is a web reporter for The Euro Weekly News covering international and Spanish national news. Got a news story you want to share? Then get in touch at editorial@euroweeklynews.com
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