About this journey

Perpignan station, which opened in 1858, sits at the southern end of the Ligne de Narbonne à Port-Bou — the historic corridor connecting France with the Iberian Peninsula. The station carries an unlikely cultural footnote: Salvador Dalí proclaimed it the Centre of the Universe following a vision there in 1963, and the following year painted La Gare de Perpignan in 1965. Today it handles an unusually mixed traffic for a regional station, with SNCF TGV and TER Occitanie services sharing its platforms alongside Spanish AVE high-speed trains operated by Renfe.

The Ligne de Narbonne à Port-Bou has carried this cross-border traffic for well over a century on standard gauge track of 1,435 mm, electrified at 1,500 V DC — a system extended through Narbonne in 1935, placing it among the earlier electrified main lines in France. The line's saturation prompted studies as far back as 2001 for a planned LGV Montpellier–Perpignan, a 150 km high-speed route designed for operation at up to 320 km/h, which would eventually relieve it. The journey ends at Narbonne station, which opened on 22 April 1857 and functions as a three-way junction serving routes toward Toulouse, Nîmes, and back south toward Perpignan and Spain — a fitting close to a corridor that has long marked the boundary between two distinct railway worlds.