JEAN-PIERRE RAFFARIN, the French Prime Minister, tempered the Gallic dream of high-speed rail travel yesterday when he devoted a size-able chunk of the country’s infrastructure budget to a far slower means of transport: the canal.

At a Cabinet meeting in Paris, M Raffarin gave approval for the first French canal for 33 years. It will be the most expensive waterway built in France, costing €2.6 billion (£1.8 billion) and it will link the Seine on the outskirts of Paris to the Dunkirk-Escaut canal in northern France.

The 65-mile waterway will be designed for merchant barges not pleasure boats, and supporters say it will help to reduce pollution and congestion on the roads. It will run near to the existing Canal du Nord, which is too narrow to transport big commercial barges.

But detractors say the money would be better spent on a high-speed railway. Although M Raffarin announced a series of new high-speed lines as part of a €20 billion investment in transport over the next eight years, the railway lobby wanted more.

Railway enthusiasts are particularly aggrieved at the failure to upgrade the Paris-Limoges line, which runs at British speeds. Among the high-velocity railway projects that won M Raffarin’s approval were the Lyons-Turin link, and the lines between Paris and cities in France that included Bordeaux in the west and Strasbourg in the east. He also agreed to six new sections of motorway.

But the Prime Minister said: “For the first time, a government has decided that 75 per cent of new infrastructure will be off the road — on railways, in ports and on the water.”

It is also the first time in three decades that a French government has ring-fenced transport funds for a canal.

Initial studies on the Seine-Nord waterway will begin in January and last two years, officials said. Digging will commence in 2006 and the first barges are scheduled to sail on it in 2014. There will be seven locks.

Paris is hoping to secure EU funding for the canal, even though the European Commission failed to give the project top priority when first asked in June. Gilles de Robien, the Transport Minister, will argue that the Seine-Nord will link with canals in Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands.

“This is a great victory for Europe because it is totally emblematic of a type of transport that is clean, peaceful and not very costly,” he said yesterday.

However, sceptics point out that the last big canal planned in France — between the Rhine and the Rhone rivers — was abandoned when the Finance Ministry demanded cuts in public spending. They say the Seine-Nord might suffer the same fate.

The agency responsible for French waterways, Voies Navigables de France, which will oversee the project, says it will enable ships to sail down the Seine through Rouen and head towards northeastern France and other northern European countries. It will be open to barges of up to 4,400 tonnes, the equivalent of 220 heavy goods vehicles, which are expected to transport merchandise such as cereals, building materials and petrol.

Explore World News

• World Agenda

• Iraq News

• US & Americas News

• Europe News

• Middle East News

• Afghanistan News

• Asia News

• Africa News

• Ireland News

Times Recommends

• Tehran cannot live up to its rhetoric
• The new unicycle that will ‘change the world’
• We cannot wish away Iran’s bomb