Two daily direct services formed of TGV Dasye sets will connect Paris and Barcelona in 6h 25min cutting 15 minutes off the current journey, which requires passengers to change between TGV and Renfe AVE services in Figueres.
Stations served include Girona and Figueres in Spain, and Perpignan, Narbonne, Montpellier, Nîmes and Valence in France.
Three additional international services will also be launched on the same day using AVE S100 high-speed trains specially adapted to operate on the French network. Two of them will connect Barcelona with Toulouse and Lyon in three and five hours respectively, while a third daily service will run between Madrid and Marseille with a journey time of seven hours.
All five daily services will use the Barcelona – Figueres high-speed line opened last January and the Figueres – Perpignan cross-border link, which was completed in February 2008 but remained unused until late 2010.
