The Route
Perpignan - Le Soler -
Toulouges - Ponteilla - Villemolaque - Banyuls-des-Aspres -
Tresserre - Montesquieu - Le Perthus - La Jonquera -
L’Estrada - Bosquero - Biure - Llers - Figueres
The Facts
In order
for the TGV to achieve speeds of 350 km/hour, it must run on
a special line, an ’LGV’ (ligne à grande vitesse) which must
be straighter than a normal train track.
The
section of the TGV line going from Perpignan to Figueres (or
rather Le Soler - Llers) will be known as the ’section
internationale’ on this LGV (ligne à grande vitesse) and is
being constructed by a private company TP Ferro, a branch of
the Spanish group ACS whilst the other part of the track is
being built by the French Eiffage group, which also built
the Eiffel Tower and the Millau viaduct.
Along the
25km of the track which will be known as ’la plate-forme de
France’ (Le Soler as far as the tunnel at Montesquieu),
there will be 39 viaducts, tunnels, bridges........ in other
words, some kind of construction every 400m approximately.
Part of
the contract states that all building work and subsequent
construction should be landscaped and planted, so that the
region does not continue to resemble a building site!
Particular care has been taken in some areas to preserve the
environment, for example in Toulouges where two large oaks
have been replanted elsewhere, as they are home to large
long-horned beetles.
Spanish
trains drive on the right, French trains drive on the left!
This has been solved by a ’saut de mouton’ (a sheep leap),
one around Tresserre and another between Le soler and
Toulouges, which allows the Spanish trains to leave the LGV
and change to a French link line until the LGV is completed
on to Montpellier.
On the French side of
the Alberes tunnel, 1.4 million square metres of earth were
moved and more than 200 tons of explosives used to break
through 800,000 square metres of rock.
The main
road most effected by the TGV is the RD618 - Argeles to Le
Boulou.
A tunnel
was completed at the end of 2007 when the first of the
’tunneliers’ broke through the final rock layers of the
Alberes into France. The two tunneliers, called Tramontane
and Mistral, do not move quite as quickly as their
namesakes!
Work has
proceeded more quickly on the Spanish side due to the fact
that the Spanish are not terribly bothered to whom the land
belongs - according to the DUP (Déclaration d’utililité
publique), once it has been ’appropriated’ by the public
services, Spanish land owners do not really have a say in
the disposal of their land - whereas the French have to
comply with permissions and land sale etc
