New Lisbon-Porto high-speed train won't be ready soon but there’s already ticket price

And interestingly enough, it’s less than what passengers need to pay today to get between the two cities via railways

The new high-speed train connection between Portugal’s two main cities – Lisbon and Porto – will probably be completed in about a decade and when ready the promise is that it will cover the distance in only 1 hour 15 minutes. This kind of convenience is much expected and will certainly be welcomed by the public although many might expect that it will be hard to afford as well.

Well, now there’s some information regarding this, too, when at the end of last week, the vice president of the Infraestruturas de Portugal (IP) Carlos Fernandes announced at the presentation of the Campanhã Urbanization Plan (PUC) in Porto that he expected the average ticket for the route to cost only 25 euros.

He compared this as a marked improvement to the current price of about 40 euros, which is what commuters pay for the route between the two cities on the Alfa Pendular tilting high-speed train currently.

Bright future for train travel in Portugal?

The estimated price sounds even more amazing given the cost-of-living crisis caused by galloping inflation in the past two years in Europe. Mr Fernandes, however, indicated that there will be various categories of pricing according to the passenger class. His optimism was not only relegated to the ticket price.

"From the assessment we made, the trains will be bigger, they will carry more passengers, they will be faster, they will make more trips,“ he told journalists, as quoted by The Portugal News.

The high-speed line is a grand-scale project, which will also make stops at Gaia, Aveiro, Coimbra and Leiria. The plan is to complete the project in three phases.

The first one, to be finished by 2030, will link Porto to Soure. The second one will extend the route from Soure to Carregado by 2032 and then the last section to Lisbon doesn’t have an exact deadline but it will also be the shortest stretch to do.

It is planned to provide 60 services per day and per direction, of which 17 will be direct, and nine with stops in intermediate cities.