The LGV Montpellier-Perpignan

I learned in the past few months that the preliminary route of the LGV Montpellier-Perpignan has been approved.  Bilal is naturally pleased, as it means that if he wants to use the train to visit his homies in Seville, he will be able to get there quicker than before.  Marseille and Seville are both extremely "street" cities with lots of hip-hop people, hence why Bilal loves Seville.  The closure of this last gap will mean that save for slow tracks in the vicinity of cities, the railway route between Marseille and Seville will be high speed all the way.

And what a scenic route it is too!  I can't comment on the not-yet-in-service lines, but the high-speed routes in service for this journey are beautiful.  There is the journey over the Rhône just after Avignon TGV station.  The slow route has many coastal stretches.  After the end of the slow stretch just after Perpignan, there is the beautiful sight of the Pyrenees approaching at 300km/h.  There are various areas of beautiful scenery from there until Zaragoza, when the line enters the Sistema Ibérico, a high mountain range.  Beyond Madrid, the line passes through many beautiful hills and olive cultivation areas, before eventually traversing the Sierra Morena and then finally through the Guadalquivir valley to Seville.  Why am I speaking this highly about a foreign country?  Bof, dunno.  *Gallic shrug*

Then there are the beautiful cities along the way.  Many Spanish ones, though I will concentrate on some lovely historic French ones along the way: - Aix-en-Provence, Avignon, Nîmes, Montpellier, Béziers, Narbonne, Perpignan etc.  The new line will be away from the centres of all these cities except Perpignan (even Perpignan's station is a little way from the historic centre), but nevertheless, they will reduce the journey times to these cities and make them easier to visit.  Too much to say about these cities to compress into one single blog post.  However, though it takes longer today, they are still worth visiting, so why wait till the completion of the line?