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France-Italy trains to return after 19-month landslide closure / Photo: © AFP/File
France-Italy trains to return after 19-month landslide closure
The hugely popular train line linking Paris with the Italian cities of Turin and Milan is to reopen in March and April after a 19-month closure forced when a landslide damaged a tunnel, French railway operator SNCF and Italian counterpart Trenitalia announced Tuesday.
SNCF said connections between Paris and Turin and Milan, which has whisked passengers from a breakfast of croissants in the French capital to a hearty pasta for lunch in Italy in six or seven hours, would resume on March 31.
Trenitalia, which is competing with SNCF on the line, said its connections would resume on April 1.
The Italian company plans two round trips per day aboard its high-speed Frecciarossa train. SNCF will offer three round trips per day on the French TGV.
The French company set up a replacement service between Paris and Milan last January in order to keep one round trip per day.
Passengers currently take a bus between Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne in France and Oulx in Italy and do the rest of the journey by TGV for a journey lasting seven and a half to nine hours -- compared to between six and seven hours before the accident.
On August 27, 2023, part of a cliff collapsed in the Maurienne Valley after heavy rains that followed a drought. Thousands of tons of rocks buried a railway tunnel approximately 300 meters long and seriously damaged the infrastructure.
The mountain had to be cleared of 5,000 cubic metres of unstable rock, using water drops by helicopter or dynamiting, before securing the cliff and then restoring the network.
In normal times, the railway line linking France and Italy welcomes around thirty international freight trains every day, as well as five to six round trips of high-speed trains and the local services to the Maurienne valley.
M.Bartosz--GL
