Lyon-Turin HSR

railway

Cities

Lyon

France

Torino

Italy

Distance

270km

new

270km

rehabilitated

– km

existing

– km

Cost

$28.5b

$28,500,000,000

Phases

underConstruction, 2032

Objective

To replace the steep, 150-year-old high-altitude Fréjus mountain track that limits train weights and requires multiple locomotives. By creating a flat alpine crossing, it quadruples freight train capacity, cuts Paris-to-Milan travel times down to four and a half hours, and removes over one million trucks from alpine roads annually. Identified by the European Commission as the primary cross-border rail link of the Mediterranean Corridor, receiving targeted CEF funding to bypass alpine rail bottlenecks

Description

A 270-kilometer international high-speed rail line centered around the Moncenisio Base Tunnel—a colossal 57.5-kilometer twin-tube passage slicing through the Alps between France and Italy at a plain-level gradient. Cross-border rail section; prioritized under CEF Funding Decision (Mont Cenis Base Tunnel). More financing was required and is incorporated into the upcoming CEF III (2028–2034) budget proposals. The international section has a split strictly by bilateral treaty (57.9% Italy / 42.1% France) before EU co-financing.

History

Initiated by a binational French-Italian declaration in 1991, the project was designated a European priority at the 1994 Essen Summit. It faced more than twenty years of fierce opposition from the No TAV movement in Italy's Susa Valley, alongside geopolitical disputes over cost-sharing formulas, which required three separate binational treaties (2001, 2012, 2015) before major access tunnel boring could safely scale up.