MADRID: French rail operator SNCF inaugurated Friday a low-cost, high-speed rail service in Spain linking Madrid and second-city Barcelona. The Ouigo service will whisk passengers the 620 kilometres (385 miles) between the two cities in just two and half hours, with prices starting at 9.00 euros.
The first Ouigo train left Madrid’s Atocha station for Barcelona at 10:15 am (0815 GMT) with invited guests on board. The commercial service will start on Monday, the day after a pandemic state of emergency ends in Spain and people can move more freely between regions, with five daily return journeys between the two cities.
SNCF plans to launch similar services between Madrid and the eastern cities of Valencia and Alicante on the Mediterranean coast by the end of the year, and to the southern Andalusia region by 2022-23. It will initially use four recently refurbished double-decker trains in Spain but plans to operate 14 trains in the country by 2023.
SNCF has invested 600 million euros ($722 million) in the Spanish operation despite posting huge losses in France because of the pandemic. Spanish state rail operator Renfe, which until recently operated a monopoly in Spain, planned to launch its own low-cost, high-speed rail service dubbed Avlo last year to compete with Ouigo but the start of the service was delayed due to the pandemic.
It is scheduled to start on June 23 with a service linking Madrid and Barcelona. Avlo is the cheaper cousin of Renfe’s popular high-speed service called AVE — which is Spanish for bird.
Italian rail operator Trenitalia and Spanish airline Air nostrum are due to launch a third budget bullet train service in Spain called Ilsa during the second half of 2022.
Spain’s high-speed rail network extends for 3,200 kilometres (2,000 miles), making it the second-longest in the world after China’s but it is underused.
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