This week I narrowly failed to reach the Mediterranean coast of Spain from the north of England by train, within the daylight hours of a single day. The problem was Paris. Train buffs (and rail service planners) read on.
Let’s begin at the end. High-speed rail from France has until this month always hit the wall at the Pyrenees. From Paris you set out on the TGV at a tremendous lick until Avignon, as high-speed track yields to something more sedate. And in the Languedoc, where the Pyrenees totter into the Mediterranean, everything used to slow down further. From Perpignan to the Spanish border the old line squeezes and sidles painfully slowly the long way around a bulge of coast, by way of dreary Portbou. The motorway, meanwhile, punches a huge short-cut through the range. From Figueres in Salvador Dalí country you then rattle along to Barcelona at a reasonable pace.
To Barcelona, then, by rail from most of Britain, has meant travelling to London, then Paris, then taking an overnight sleeper train. You wouldn’t get much change out of 20 hours. Driving takes about 24 hours, and is truly grim — believe me — after you’ve done it about 50 times.
Rail is now mounting an increasing challenge to road and air. In Spain and France, for some years now and at vast expense, they’ve been building a very high-speed track between Barcelona and Perpignan, which (like the motorway) punches through the coastal range. The first section, from Perpignan in France to Figueres in Spain, has just opened. You can travel in a single journey from Paris direct to Figueres, in the same TGV train. You’re on TGV-speed tracks for the whole route except for a short, slow bit in the middle between Montpelier and Perpignan. A train leaves Paris, Gare de Lyon, after lunch, and arrives in Figueres about five hours later. Which is frankly amazing.
This sounded like fun. Anyone who, like me, flies (usually by Ryanair, to Girona), knows that it’s a tiresome business; that it’s getting harder to take serious luggage on the plane except at great cost; that you now need earplugs for the entire flight to insulate you from incessant loudspeakered entreaties to buy scratchcards; and that getting to (and parking at) Britain’s airports, and getting through security, has become an intolerable drag. Though you only spend a couple of hours in the air (with your knees under your chin — and I’m only 5ft 8in), the whole thing knocks most of the stuffing out of a day.
So, we thought, why not try a daylight-hours dash from our nearest mainline station, Chesterfield, a few miles south of the Yorkshire border, to Figueres? You can now buy a ticket all the way to Paris; and in Chesterfield we boarded the pleasant East Midlands Trains carriage just before 8 a.m. last Saturday, breakfasted on the train, and made an easy connection within St Pancras for the Eurostar before 11. We’d allowed nearly 90 minutes in Paris for the interchange between the Gare du Nord and the Gare de Lyon, and felt relaxed as we boarded the (now) old-fashioned-feeling Eurostar service at St Pancras.
Disaster. Our train waited an hour outside the Chunnel, for engineering works. A beastly 66 minutes late in Paris, we missed our connection. We might (just) have made it if we’d risked a 17-minute dash, but at Gare de Lyon (where the SNCF are about as customer-friendly as the Libyan army) nobody would have cared about two Eurostar passengers who claimed their train had reached the Gare du Nord late. In the Gare du Nord, Eurostar gave us a replacement ticket for the next TGV to Perpignan.
We arrived before midnight, too late for an onward train, and hired a taxi to our pre-booked hotel in Figueres; €150 hurt.
Yet I’d enjoyed the journey, read half a book, shared a pleasant bottle of wine in the buffet as France flew by in the lengthening shadows of a March afternoon, and stretched back for an hour and slept. So much better than Ryanair — and no more expensive than a late-booked ‘low cost’ flight.
So, yes, the problem was Paris. I’ve never seen the magic of Paris but even those who do would not seek it on an interchange by public transport. Paris is a black hole of grubby uncertainty in any transport itinerary. Whenever I champion the idea of the train to Spain, friends say, ‘But do you have to change in Paris?’ Their faces fall.
The Gare du Nord’s a shabby mess. There were queues for taxis and the RER metro (which we took) is dismal: dark, dirty and threatening, reminiscent of the sci-fi film Blade Runner. Only poor black immigrants, derelicts, gangs of Arab youths and tourists appeared to be using it. Paramilitary police squads stroll around, heavily armed.
Something is going wrong with France. I can’t put my finger on what, but I don’t know what France means or stands for, or where it thinks it’s going. I suspect the French had a splendid revolution but, since 1789, haven’t worked out what to do next. My residual British republicanism has finally slipped away. We’d remove the monarchy, then muck up the replacement, wouldn’t we?
The answer — not for France, or Britain’s constitutional arrangements, but for inter-European rail travel — surely has to be Lille. Already you can sometimes change there for Avignon. Why not for Spain, once that final leg from Figueres to Barcelona is open? With a 30-minute interchange at Lille TGV station I reckon you could do Chesterfield to Barcelona in about 11 hours. Eleven pleasant hours. And you’d miss Paris. And Paris is worth a miss.
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