Contournement Nîmes – Montpellier
railway line
The Contournement Nîmes – Montpellier (English: "Nîmes – Montpellier Bypass"), also known as the LGV Nîmes–Montpellier (French: LGV for ligne à grande vitesse), is a French high-speed railway line, bypassing the cities of Nîmes and Montpellier in Southern France. It has the distinction of being the first ligne à grande vitesse to be intentionally built for mixed passenger and freight traffic.
The programme was developed with the aim of providing the capacity for several new passenger services, including a 30% increase in the frequency of regional trains, as well as additional freight traffic. Additional benefits include a reduction in travel times for both national and international traffic traversing the route. The line is planned for mixed-use traffic by both TGV trains and freight. The Nîmes – Montpellier Bypass provides access onto the Spanish rail network as well as the proposed mixed LGV Montpellier–Perpignan, a new high-speed line between Montpellier and Perpignan. The journey from Montpellier to Paris takes less than three hours on the new line. In June 2012, SNCF Réseau entered a 25-year public-private partnership with the OC’VIA consortium for the financing, designing, building and maintenance of the line.
On 10 December 2017, the first commercial freight train used the route. The first passenger services to Montpellier Sud de France station commenced on 7 July 2018; full service to the station began on 15 December 2019 with the opening of Nîmes–Pont du Gard station.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Contournement Nîmes – Montpellier” as railway line. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as railway line. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1221456. Authority coordinates are 43.813, 4.502. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2012, 2017, 2018 and 2019.
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This entry incorporates text from “Contournement Nîmes – Montpellier” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.