FRANCE: Velvet has unveiled an Alstom Avelia Horizon trainset in its livery, as the high speed new entrant prepares to compete against SNCF as France’s first domestic private entrant with its own new-build fleet.
The unveiling took place at Alstom’s La Rochelle site in southwest France, where the trainsets are being assembled. While Velvet’s parent company Proxima had presented the Velvet brand last year, this is the first completed trainset ready for testing ahead of the planned 2028 launch. The livery features a dark fir green, lilac and white branding, intended to offer a bold contrast to the silver and blue of SNCF.
In 2024 Proxima ordered 12 nine-car Avelia Horizon high speed trains, the same model chosen by SNCF for its next-generation TGV Inoui (previously known as TGV M) fleet which is now expected to start entering service this year. The double-deck train is designed for speeds above 300 km/h and to provide high capacity on core inter-city routes. By relying on a train design already selected by SNCF, Proxima hopes to avoids some of the complexity seen in more bespoke rolling stock programmes and France’s demanding testing and certification processes.
Production of Velvet’s trains is spread across multiple Alstom sites in France, including Belfort for the power cars and La Rochelle and Aytré for the passenger vehicles, with close to 1 000 employees involved in the programme.
Maintenance is to be undertaken near Bordeaux, with Velvet saying the project will support job creation both within the company and across its industrial partners.
New entrants target France’s liberalising market
Velvet, led by former SNCF executive Rachel Picard, is the commercial brand of Proxima, a French private high speed operator founded in 2021 and backed by around €1bn from investor Antin Infrastructure Partners.
The project represents one of the most advanced attempts so far to introduce large-scale competition in the French high speed rail market, where SNCF has long dominated not just operations but also access to rolling stock, maintenance and commercially viable train paths.
While EU rules have opened the market to new entrants, few have progressed to the point of securing trains, funding and a clear launch timeline; last year rival French project Kevin Speed pushed back its planned launch to 2030 last year amid funding and industrial delays. More recently, Spain’s state-owned Renfe indefinitely suspended plans to expand high speed services in France, casting fresh uncertainty over another French high speed hopeful, Le Train.
Proxima, however, appears to have weathered those pressures and is centring its offer on a limited fleet of high-capacity trains for the busiest corridors west of Paris, where it argues demand continues to outstrip supply.
Rather than pursuing broader network coverage, Velvet is first focusing on direct, high-volume services and commercially attractive flows west from Paris. It says its trains will add around 10 million seats per year on services linking the capital with Bordeaux, Nantes, Angers and Rennes.
Velvet’s planned 2028 launch will therefore serve as a key test of whether a privately funded operator can establish a foothold in France’s high speed market at scale. Italy’s state-backed Trenitalia is perhaps Europe’s most successful recent example of a high speed operator expanding at scale, but it has done so with deep public backing and a longer investment horizon than most private entrants. Velvet’s launch, still some way off despite the arrival of its first train, should offer a clearer indication of whether that can be replicated in France without state support.