Last February, French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne announced plans to invest €100 billion in railway transport by 2040. The announcement confirmed the intentions of President Emmanuel Macron who, in November 2022, said that he wanted to develop an equivalent of the Regional Express Network (RER) in a dozen French cities.
These statements have had a certain impact on the municipalities forming the ‘Sillon lorrain’, the axis consisting of Épinal, Nancy, Metz, Thionville, and Luxembourg City, whose mayors hope to benefit from modernised infrastructure to facilitate access to the Grand Duchy.
On Thursday, MP Charlotte Leduc from the Moselle department warned of the “catastrophic situation” of the Metz-Luxembourg TER line. Similarly, Nancy Mayor Mathieu Klein recently lamented that the Lorraine region is affected by major connection issues and that now is the time to improve railway access to the Grand Duchy for the growing number of cross-border commuters.
Mayor Klein noted: “We have seized this opportunity at the level of the Lorraine axis. Épinal, Nancy, Metz, and Thionville jointly applied to create the European metropolitan express network of the Lorraine axis and thus favour fast access to the Grand Duchy from Lorraine and a more regular frequency to really, concretely promote modal transfer, that is to say to allow motorists who are currently stuck in traffic jams on the A31 to choose the train to get to the Grand Duchy more easily and more quickly.”
Luxembourg’s involvement is certainly considered an asset for the Lorraine axis bid. Mayor Klein accordingly points out that the “Grand Duchy has chosen co-development as its strategy”. Respective investments already exist, such as the park-and-ride facilities in Thionville and Longwy. Thus, if the Nancy-Luxembourg axis were chosen for this European metropolitan express network, the Grand Duchy might co-finance certain infrastructures.
“I am obviously counting on [Luxembourgish Prime Minister] Xavier Bettel to support this project,” said the Nancy Mayor. “I know that he is sensitive to this because he knows perfectly well that today, the residential economy in the Grand Duchy is partly based on the ability of German and French workers to come to work in the Grand Duchy on a daily basis under good conditions. So we are really in a win-win situation. Better access to Lorraine, better access to Luxembourg, and the ability for Luxembourg to continue to recruit cross-border workers in Lorraine, but also in Germany and Belgium.”
Mayor Klein believes that the Grand Duchy’s co-investment to promote the transformation of Lorraine’s infrastructure can be perfectly relevant “because it is also a question of Luxembourg remaining attractive and easy to access, given the constant increase in the number of cross-border workers.”
