About this journey

Marseille Saint-Charles station sits at the heart of France's oldest city — a port founded around 600 BC as the Greek colony of Massalia — and has served rail passengers since it opened on 8 January 1848, built for the Chemins de fer de Paris à Lyon et à la Méditerranée on the site of a former cemetery. Today its 14 terminal platforms and four through tracks, all energised at 1500 V DC overhead, handle traffic fanning out toward Ventimiglia, Paris, and the eastern corridor followed here toward Briançon.

This corridor is the route of the TER Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur regional service linking Marseille with Aix-en-Provence, Gap, and Briançon, operated here by an SNCF X72500 X-TER unit. The journey crosses from the Mediterranean coast into the Hautes-Alpes department of southeastern France, where Briançon station stands as the eastern terminus of the Veynes–Briançon railway. A drive time of just over four hours connects a major coastal hub to one of the most remote Alpine termini in the French rail network — a station that also receives a nightly Intercités de nuit service from Paris, underlining Briançon's position as an endpoint that belies its mountain setting.