High-speed rail link from Basel to Paris gains another half hour
Friday, 09.09.2011

High-speed rail link from Basel to Paris gains another half hour

With the opening of the Rhine–Rhône section of the high-speed rail system (TGV) on 11 December 2011, the journey from Basel to Paris will be about half an hour faster.

The French capital will then be just three hours away. The line runs via Mulhouse, Belfort and Dijon. The plan is to operate six trains a day in each direction – to date it has been five a day with the TGV East via Strasbourg. The first TGV train is expected to leave Basel SBB railway station at 8.34 a.m. – after this, they will leave every two hours. At the end of 2011 new double-decker carriages will also be used for the first time, and by the end of 2012 all today’s Duplex trains will be replaced, so instead of 358 seats, each TGV train will then offer 509 seats. Bookings for the new link to Paris can be placed with the SBB as from 12 October.


From 2012 onwards there will be a daily TGV link direct from Basel to Lyon and back. It remains to be seen whether this TGV section will be extended to Marseille or Montpellier. If the service is well used, it could be expanded later on. The journey time to Lyon will be much shorter as from December 2011, when the change in Mulhouse is taken into account. Today the journey from Basel to Lyon, usually via Geneva, takes almost five hours. From Mulhouse the journey to Lyon, for which seven trains will operate in each direction, will only take two hours and 50 minutes as from 11 December.

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