LGV Sud Europe Atlantique

The LGV Sud Europe Atlantique (LGV SEA), also known as the LGV Sud-Ouest, is a high-speed railway line under construction between Tours and Bordeaux, in France. It will be used by TGV trains operated by SNCF, the French national railway company. It is an extension of the LGV Atlantique and is expected to enter service in mid-2017.

The LGV SEA will bring high-speed rail service to southwestern France and connect the régions of Poitou-Charentes, Aquitaine and Midi-Pyrénées with the high-speed rail service of Northern Europe, which connects Paris to London, Brussels, Amsterdam and beyond. The trip between Paris and Bordeaux will take around two hours and ten minutes at a projected speed of 300 km/h. The inter-city links between Tours, Poitiers, Angoulême, and Bordeaux will also be improved and southwestern France will be better connected to various parts of the country and to the rest of Europe.

The project is also a response to the heavy traffic on the existing rail line. Train tracks are most efficiently used when all trains circulate at the same speed and have identical stops. The large speed difference between the fast TGV trains, which circulate on the existing tracks at speeds up to 220 km/h, and the slower freight trains and TER (regional) trains, which share the same track, forces to greatly increase the interval between these trains. This congests the tracks and prevents their most efficient usage.

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