The Perpignan-Rungis primeurs train is back – Le HuffPost

Twitter Jean Castex

TRANSPORT – He left on Friday shortly after 4 p.m. from Perpignan station under the eyes of Jean Castex. After 11 hours on the rails at nearly 140km / h (making it the fastest freight train in Europe), the now famous “Primeurs train” made a comeback at the Rungis market this Saturday, October 23 around 3 a.m. Enough to allow fruits and vegetables to be bought in the morning on the markets of Paris and its surroundings.

It had been two years since the link was suspended due to a lack of customers. The obsolescence of the equipment was then widely singled out. However, it is not in new refrigerated wagons that tomatoes from Morocco, lemons from Italy and Spain or peppers from Spain were able to take the train.

Scheduled five times a week during the early season (November to July), the trains of the new Perpignan-Rungis have all been hired by the Primever loader. They will be half the length of their predecessors, because a good half of the wagons could not be saved. But they will still provide 10% of the consumption of the Rungis market and above all prevent 18 trucks from driving to the capital; however, they will continue to make the return trip empty.

Ecology in action: thanks to the rail motorway that we are relaunching today, each year we will avoid the passage of 26,000 trucks on the roads which connect Perpignan to Île-de-France. pic.twitter.com/4ZXuIixJgZ

– Jean Castex (@JeanCASTEX) October 22, 2021

“There is a distortion between rail and road. It is justified, since this is our political choice, that public money come to restore it ”, greeted Prime Minister Jean Castex on the platform of the station of Perpignan. A few minutes from the start, the regional of the stage (the town of Prades of which he was the mayor is located a few kilometers away) thus justified the 14 million euros put on the table by the State to ensure a future for line.

A short-term future, however, since the end of the early bird train is scheduled for 2024. The refrigerated wagons will indeed run out of steam. The rest is theoretically a rail motorway that will go from Barcelona to Antwerp via Perpignan and Rungis.

See also on The HuffPost: What the new TGV M unveiled by Macron looks like