The Lyon-Turin railway project is supported by Brussels and divides the left. How can you be an environmentalist and oppose a freight rail line? Enough! takes stock of this European project, subsidized by 30 billion euros of public money.
One year after the demonstration organized by Soulèvements de la Terre against the Lyon-Turin railway project, the opponents gathered again on 2 June in Aoste, in the Isère region. The citizens’ committees of opponents thus denounce the environmental and landscape impact of the gigantic infrastructure.
The project involves not only the construction of the largest tunnel in Europe between Savoy and Piedmont, but also a freight and passenger line between the Lyon-Saint-Exupéry TGV station and Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne. It consists of 160 km of tracks crossing 71 municipalities in Isère and Savoie and dozens of engineering structures, including three large tunnels under the Chartreuse and Belledonne mountain ranges.
Less than a week before the European elections, it is also an opportunity to take stock of this old snake in the ground, ardently supported by Brussels, and which in France is dividing the left: the rebel movements and ecologists vote against, the communists in favor.
What’s the situation?
Work on the base tunnel, a double tube 57.5 km long (45 km in France and 12.5 km in Italy), began in 2002. “There are 164 km of tunnels to be excavated, of which 37 km are have already been excavated,” Daniel Bursaux, president of Telt (Tunnel Euralpin Lyon Turin), the binational public body responsible for the tunnel’s construction, told Prime Minister Gabriel Attal during a visit to the construction site on May 14. Only 13 km of the tunnel will be dug on the French side, while the rest will be tunnels used for construction, maintenance or as emergency exits.
Map of the Lyon-Turin route, Transalpine Committee, 2018
Five of the seven giant tunnel boring machines (TBMs) needed to continue drilling have been delivered by the manufacturer in Germany. They must be transported to the Maurienne region and then reassembled before work can begin. Even with the enhancement of these technological monsters, hoping to drill 127 km by 2032 – the announced date for commissioning – is optimistic to say the least. Even more so since underground cavities have delayed the completion of two ventilation shafts in the Maurienne region, the specialist newspaper Le Moniteur revealed in March, and “while awaiting the arrival of a remotely controlled robot designed to fill them, the date of start-up of tunnel boring machines is uncertain”.
How can you be an environmentalist and oppose a freight rail line?
This is the question posed by Gabriel Attal. In addition to passenger traffic, the new connection will increase rail freight transport across the Alps and “avoid the movement of millions of trucks” between France and Italy, he said, while “currently, about 44 million tonnes per year , 92% travel by truck.” This would be a relief for the Alpine valleys, which are currently choked with heavy vehicle traffic.
The rail connection between Lyon and Turin already exists and is far from saturated.
But in the eyes of the Sud-Rail union, a member of the coalition of French opponents of the Lyon-Turin project, the promise did not overcome the obstacle of reality. For Julien Troccaz, federal secretary of the union, “building a new infrastructure when a railway line already exists between Lyon and Turin and is far from saturated” demonstrates the lack of a real will to transfer trucks from the road to the road as quickly as possible. railway and to “relocate activities as global warming should require”.
And he continues by denouncing the fact that “in Maurienne, the project has already led to the irreversible destruction of an essential tool for local rail transport: the Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne marshalling yard. Dismantled in May 2023 at the request of Telt, because it was located on the route of future French accesses to the tunnel, the station, with its 40 tracks, made it possible to park and train freight trains and to serve local companies that were customers of Fret SNCF”. explains the trade unionist. Now this is no longer possible and trucks will have to return to the roads, even if the French accesses will not enter service before 2040!
Sud-Rail contrasts the mirage of Lyon-Turin with the desolate state of rail freight transport in France. Between 2002 and 2018, volumes transported by rail fell from 50 to 33 billion tonnes per kilometre. In France, the share of rail freight transport has fallen to 10%, compared to 23% in Germany and 18% of the European Union average.
However, far from coming to the rescue of this sector, which is essential for the decarbonisation of transport, the government has decreed the dismantling of Fret SNCF, the main operator, by the end of the year. The company has already had to hand over 23 rail flows to competitors – trains chartered from point to point by customers – representing 20% of its turnover and 10% of its workforce.
This liquidation “risks compromising the objective of doubling the modal share of rail freight transport by 2030, as set out in the Climate and Resilience Act”, warns the parliamentary commission of inquiry in its report on the liberalization of rail freight transport goods in December 2023. This sector has suffered from deindustrialisation, but, the parliamentarians note, even more from its abandonment over the last 30 years by public policy (in favor of road transport) and the subsequent managements of the SNCF (in favor of the TGV).
“Asymmetric competition” with road transport – which benefits from lower motorway tolls and diesel taxes – has put the final nails in the coffin of French rail transport. In the absence of a determined public policy, new infrastructure alone will not be able to revive rail transport. The proof: despite the major modernization works carried out between 2003 and 2011 on the existing Lyon-Turin line, rail freight traffic has decreased in favor of road.
What is the environmental impact of the works?
In Maurienne, the village of Villarodin-Bourget, where work on the tunnel began more than 20 years ago, could serve as a showcase village. Located in the Vanoise National Park, its forest has been deforested and the site on the banks of the Arc, once a mosaic of woods, meadows and vegetable gardens, has been transformed into a concrete platform, while 400,000 m3 of piled rubble obscures the horizon. In total, according to the Confédération paysanne, the construction of the new connection risks artificializing 1,500 hectares of agricultural land, in particular to store millions of tons of rubble.
Aerial view of the TELT construction site in Villarodin-Bourget, as part of the construction of the Lyon-Turin base tunnel, in November 2022. CC-BY-SA 4.0 Florian Pépellin via Wikimedia Commons
The opposition is now focusing on the threat to water resources posed by the excavation work. By draining 60 to 150 million cubic meters of groundwater every year, they are disrupting the hydrogeological network of the Maurienne and Val de Suse regions, endangering sources and basins of drinking water, according to Philippe Delhomme, co-president of the association Vivre et Agir en Maurienne (VAM). This comes at a time when rising temperatures, particularly affecting the Alpine region, have already reduced annual river flows and groundwater levels. Since the beginning of the works”, he underlines, “several municipalities in the valley have seen their springs dry up”.
In 2021, Vivre et Agir en Maurienne (Living and acting in the Maurienne) raised an alarm about twenty drinking water abstractions in five Savoyard municipalities. The tunnel route passes through their protection zones, even if prefectural decrees formally prohibit any excavation of the soil and subsoil.
Since then, no solution has been proposed by Telt or the government. But the Lyon-Turin train will not be stopped for this: the solution has been found. In July 2023, the Prefect of Savoy commissioned a study to evaluate the project’s impact on water resources, but curiously only on quality and not quantity.
Last March, strong in the conclusion that the risk of pollution, for example from hydrocarbons, was non-existent, the prefect announced that the ordinances would be modified: excavation works would no longer be prohibited within the protection perimeters of the basins affected water bodies. This eliminates the violation of the water law, but not the risk.
How much will it cost?
The Lyon-Turin project is also colossal in terms of costs, estimated at over 26 billion euros in 2012, or around 30 billion euros today with inflation, of which 9.6 billion euros for the cross-border tunnel alone, according to the European Court of Auditors in 2020. The European Union is the real financial engine of the project”, observes Paolo Prieri, member of Presidio Europa, the Italian coalition that opposes ‘large useless projects’. For the cross-border section, it contributes to 50% of the cost of the work, while the rest is divided 58% between Italy and 42% between France”.
Even though in 2022 the European Court of Auditors criticized the project promoters’ “gross overestimates of environmental gains”, pointing out that the construction of the infrastructure would have generated 10 million tonnes of CO2 emissions, Brussels defends the project. For example, the European Commission has repeatedly deviated from its “use it or lose it” rule, under which it recovers grant funds that are not used by their expiration by extending those granted to Telt. “A simple way to guarantee decades of succulent projects, driven by 30 billion of public money,” comments Les Soulèvements de la Terre.
Source: Basta!, 29 May 2024
https://basta.media/Grand-projet-ferroviaire-Lyon-Turin-pourquoi-ecologistes-sy-opposent
Translation by Enzo Gargano for the Sereno Regis Study Center
After a twenty-year collaboration with the newspaper Libération, Eliane Patriarca is today a freelance journalist specializing in environmental investigations. She has dealt in particular with asbestos risk, in France and Italy. To delve deeper into the topic of the Marocchinate, fearing that it also affected her family, originally from Ciociaria, you conducted the investigation at the base of The fault of the winnersawarded the Fiuggi Prize.
