Abstract
In a radical departure, SNCF, the French state railway company, launched a public consultation in 2016 about the route for the first of a series of piecemeal extensions to the proposed French high‐speed railway (ligne à grande vitesse) LGV network in Provence‐Alpes‐Côte d'Azur. A cheaper proposal to build an inland line, bypassing Marseilles and Toulon, met strong opposition as it would have traversed landscapes made famous by Cézanne's nineteenth century paintings. This alternative offered options for tunnelling under Marseilles, including an underground TGV station due for completion in 2033. Eventually heading eastwards, a line about 35 km long with a lengthy tunnel into the port city of Toulon will be built by around 2040 from Aubagne. Unlike Britain and problems building HS2 bypassing the West Coast railway mainline into London, France has well‐established relatively generous compensation procedures for anybody losing property due to new infrastructure schemes. Also, this SNCF budget is split into many portions, while HS2 has been hampered by poor geological knowledge of likely ground conditions along parts of the route resulting in massive cost overruns. Even after the Oakervee review into how to bring these cost overruns under control gave the green light for construction of HS2 to continue in February 2020, these underlying factors were hardly considered in this technical and economic report.
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