Work on the long-awaited Tangentielle Nord line is soon to start, a 28 km route connecting up Paris's suburbs: phase 1 in a major project for Ile-de-France.

Good news! The planned Tangentielle Nord line has been declared to be in the public interest. This new line will connect Sartrouville (Yvelines) with Noisy-le-Sec (Seine Saint-Denis) in only 35 minutes, a 28 km route that avoids the centre of Paris. This will be the 1st part of a round-Paris circular rail link.

Who is it for? The Tangentielle Nord line will make life easier for 200,000 passengers who will use it every day to commute, to go to school or down to the market. That means fewer cars and cleaner air in the Ile-de-France region. The Tangentielle Nord line will also boost the local economy in the départements it runs through: Seine-Saint-Denis, Val d’Oise and Yvelines.

Service +. It will be a new type of train, narrower, brighter (with no compartment separations) and quieter. It will run more like a metro service, every 5 minutes at peak times (every 10 minutes off-peak), from 5:00 am to midnight. The line will boast 14 stations (including 6 new ones) with staff to welcome travellers. There will be significant interconnection with the 5 RER lines, with SNCF Transilien trains from Paris-Nord and Paris Saint-Lazare, with 2 tram lines and 2 metro lines.

When's it going to happen?Work is due to start in 2009. The line will be opened section-by-section starting in 2014 for Epinay-sur-Seine to Le Bourget, with a full opening in 2017.

How much will it cost? Approximately €160 million for the rolling stock and €1 billion for the construction work, which involves building 28 km of rail track exclusively for the Tangentielle Nord line, 13 km of sound-proofing embankments and removing 14 level crossings.