Has France finally won its grand plan to modernize the French railways? Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne promised investments of 100 billion euros by 2040 on February 24. It has thus endorsed the ambitious recommendations of the Infrastructure Orientation Council (COI). We must now move on to practice: plan the work and its funding. This is the role of state-region plan contracts. The regional prefects await receive their framework letters to start negotiations with the regional presidents and other local authorities, and put the implementation of the projects on the agenda. However, these letters are suspended pending the final arbitrations by Matignon, who promised them… before June.
On the financial side, all players are waiting to see how much the state is willing to put on the table. Bercy, which believes that it has already done a lot to support the public company, counts first on the results of the beneficiary SNCF subsidiaries – SNCF Voyageurs and the logistics company Geodis. But that will not be enough to settle the bill of 5 to 6 billion euros per year provided for in the plan. No more than European funding proposed by the Ministry of Transport. A tax on kerosene or a new flat tire on the freeways are planned.
What will all this money be used for once the financing plan is set? Seven priorities stand out.
Rejuvenate the network
At SNCF, this is called “grey debt” in internal jargon. This is not a financial debt, but an accumulation of delays in the necessary renewal of the installations that allow the trains to operate (rails, overhead lines, points, etc.). Since investment in new high-speed lines was favored until 2011, the network of daily trains and medium-sized lines is aging.
This cumulative restructuring delay, the “grey debt”, is valued at 60 billion euros by SNCF Réseau. The problem is well documented: the 2005 Rivier report (named after a professor at the University of Lausanne who specializes in railways); exam 2017; Opinion of the traffic regulator in February 2022 on the State-SNCF 2021-2030 service contract; and in early 2023 the IOC report.
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To start with, a clear observation: the average age of our tracks was 28.6 years in 2021, compared to 17 years in the German network. Aging has been slowed down by the closure of the oldest small lines and the start of modernization work, particularly on the Ile-de-France network. However, this was not the case on the other rails. Result: The Channel Consistency Index (LCI), which measures the health of the network, is not good. A new track has an ICV of 100, an end-of-life track has 10; a track that has exceeded its theoretical usage limit by five years by zero. A rail network in good condition has an LCI of 55. Currently, French rail is around 48.8. In 2016 it was 46.5. In its report, the COI therefore recommends increasing the state-financed network renewal efforts from EUR 2.8 billion per year to EUR 3.5 billion to EUR 4.2 billion per year – i.e. EUR 1 billion more. by 2040, which would make it possible to rejuvenate the age of the main lines of the network by two to three years and set the LCI at 55 in 2040. “Remember that the route in France is 30 years old, compared to 17 years in Germany and 15 years in Switzerland,” pounded Jean-Pierre Farandou before the National Assembly’s finance committee, which on April 12 appointed a chief of the national assembly for the first time since 2013 SNCF received. Total costs: around 20 billion euros.
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