Basil Howitt tracks :) the progress of the France-Spain line from the Puffing Billies to the high-speed TGVs.

“Vive la Catalogne!”

From Puffing Billies to 350 km/hour

At 14.29 on 23rd November last, a literally earth-shattering event took place near the French/Spanish border town of Le Perthus. I’m speaking of the moment when a gigantic drill – La Tramontana - pierced through the northbound railway tunnel-in-progress under the Albères. The southbound tunnel had been pierced by Le Mistral on 1st October. The completed tunnel, 8.3 kilometres long, linking Spanish and French Catalonia, is a historic step towards the completion of the new high-speed LGV railway line (Ligne de Grande Vitesse) between Perpignan and Barcelona.

TGV trains are due to run on the 44.4 kilometre stretch between Perpignan and Figueras from February 2009. The cost is a cool 1,096.7 million euros, shared by the French and Spanish governments, the EU and the joint French-Spanish private construction consortium T. P. Ferro.

The Figueras-Barcelona section is delayed until 2012, owing to subterranean geological problems there and in Gerona. Original plans threatened many foundations, including the projected temple of Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia church in Barcelona. Personally, I wouldn’t weep if that whole surrealist edifice crumbled, but I am clearly in a minority since the church is one of Spain’s most popular tourist attractions.

The tunnel breakthrough near Le Perthus was certainly something to celebrate. After all, 1.4 million square metres of French earth had been moved and more than 200 tons of explosives used to break through 800,000 square metres of rock. No wonder hundreds of bottles of fizzy Cava were popped, and emotional speeches made by French and Spanish ministers in front of 500 remaining construction workers in their white helmets and yellow jackets. “This tunnel,” said Jean-Louis Borloo, Minister of the Environment, “is going to re-unite Perpignan and Barcelona, two parts of the same culture. Vive la Catalogne …”

The Tramontana drilling machine (named after our raging prevailing wind) seemed more sci-fi than real in this extraordinary feat of civil engineering: a huge monster that would have dumbfounded Vulcan in his forge. Wheels 10 metres in diameter carried steel teeth weighing an incredible 120 kilos each! Fifteen metres in length and weighing 2,300 tonnes, the machine required more than an HGV licence to drive it.

The gauge width in Spain will be the same as in France and the rest of Europe (1.435 metres) rather than Spain’s wider gauge of 1.688 metres. However, there will be a “saut de mouton” (a sheep’s leap) on the French side so that the trains can continue to drive on the right in Spain and transfer to the left in France.

One incidental boost to the regional economy has been the temporary influx of some 15,000 wives and children who joined the workers for whatever duration since work began in November 2004.

Puffing Billies

The prospect of a 50-minute journey from Perpignan to Barcelona (at c. 350 k/hour) brings back vivid memories of my first trip to Barcelona with my parents 50 years ago when I was 17. My father, as a former clerk at Thomas Cook, was able to get discounted travel tickets and I recall the culture shock after we had travelled to Port Bou on a swish overnight French Express - second class couchettes, superb dinner in the dining car and next morning either classic French or English breakfast. How on earth did they manage all that when today you can just about get a microwaved ham roll on most express trains if you’re lucky?

And then at Port Bou, because of Spain’s wider track gauge we had to get off the Express, heave and jostle our heavy solid suitcases through customs, and cram ourselves into a filthy, sweltering, steam-driven train with just single compartments that puffed its way very slowly to Barcelona. It stopped everywhere, picking up peasants taking their poultry from markets. No chance of opening the window otherwise you would be covered in smuts.

Nowadays, getting to Spain by train is much easier: the Spanish Talgo runs every day from Montpellier right down to Cartagena. The gauge change is somehow carried out beneath your feet without your having to move as the train emerges from the tunnel between Cerbère and Port Bou.
 “Where there is no vision, the people perish.”
Returning to the new LGV line, none can have been happier when the tunnel was completed than Jean-Paul Alduy, current dynastic Mayor of Perpignan and set for another electoral victory in March. For him, the screaming drills were a crucial step nearer to his passionate vision of a cross-border “agglomeration” or built-up area of 900,000 inhabitants between Narbonne and Gerona, with Barcelona and its 1.5 million inhabitants on the doorstep: a potentially thriving economic zone in which Perpignan will finally become “a town of European dimensions”. In his perhaps euphoric words echoing those of Dali when the latter famously arrived at Perpignan station in September 1963, Alduy expressed a vision where “On se tourne vers le centre du monde.” (“We are turning towards the centre of the world.”)

Alduy can only be thrilled also by the designation of Perpignan as the Capital of Catalan Culture this year – the first time ever that the honour has been given to any town in French Catalonia. More of this anon.
***
Sources:
L’Indépendant (various broadsheet editions, Catalan region)
www.lindependant.com (various editions)
www.answers.com/topic/lgv-perpignan
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGV_Perpignan-Figueres
www.anglophone-direct.com
www.perillos.com/dali.html

© 2008 Basil Howitt