Latour de Carol: the border station in the eastern Pyrenees

There's so much to say about La Tour de Carol - Enveitg that we've written a whole page dedicated to this one station.

Perched on a Pyrenean plateau on the border between France and Spain, it's definitely one of our favourites.

Where is La Tour de Carol station?

Perched on the border between France and Spain, the Latour de Carol station is actually located in the village of Enveitg in the French-Catalan Pyrenees, about 15 km south-east of Andorra, and barely a kilometre north of the Spanish border. The Spanish-Catalan town of Puigcerdà lies about 3.5 km to the south-east.

In the full French administrative hierarchy, Enveitg is a commune...

... in the arrondissement of Prades

... in the canton of Les Pyrénées catalanes

... in the department of Pyrénées-Orientales

... in the region of Occitanie.

The station lies at 1,231 m above sea-level.

History of Latour de Carol station

In August 1904, France and Spain signed an international treaty, among whose provisions was that a trans-frontier railway should be built through the Pyrenees. 

The French government subsequently approved the construction of the Chemin de Fer d'Ax-les-Thermes à la Frontière d'Espagne [Railway from Ax-les-Thermes to the Spanish Frontier] in 1907.

Construction of the railway was slow, in part due to the difficult terrain, and was further delayed by the First World War. The line was finally completed and opened in 1929.

This route came to be known as the Transpyrénéen Oriental, or the Eastern Trans-Pyrenean Railway. 

(Its counterpart, the Transpyrénéen Occidental, or Western Trans-Pyrenean Railway, running from Pau to Canfranc, is no longer fully operational: the last international train on this route ran in 1970. In March of that year, a freight train derailed, damaging the line and destroying a bridge over the Estanguet river. The line was closed and has never re-opened; while there is some talk of re-opening the line — perhaps as early as 2028 — it is unclear whether funding will be available to make this happen.)

The Train Jaune line was originally built in 1910, but was only extended to Latour de Carol in 1927.

In the 1980s, SNCF stopped running trains to Latour de Carol altogether, providing instead a bus service between Ax-les-Thermes and Latour de Carol, and there was a risk that one of Europe's most interesting railway stations might never again see a train service.

Happily, rail service was subsequently restored, and trains running to and from Latour de Carol have never been more popular.

Which trains run to Latour de Carol station?

Latour de Carol station is unusual in hosting lines with three different track gauges.

The standard-gauge (1,435 mm) line runs northward through Foix to Toulouse. 

This line is used by regular TER (regional) trains to Toulouse, as well as occasional long-distance Intercités de Nuit sleeper-trains straight through to Paris.

The broader Iberian-gauge (1,668 mm) line runs south-eastwards and then south from Latour de Carol, across the border into Spain / Catalunya, passing through Puigcerdà on its way to Barcelona.

As far as Puigcerdà, the first station across the border in Spain, the line is double-tracked, with one standard-gauge track, with overhead electrical supply at 1500 V DC, and one Iberian-gauge track (which continues to Barcelona), electrified at 3000 V DC.

And the metre-gauge Ligne de Cerdagne (also known as the Petit Train Jaune line thanks to the little yellow trains that run on it) heads eastwards to Villefranche-Vernet-les-Bain. Power on this line is supplied by a third rail.

Platforms at La Tour de Carol station

The platform* numbering scheme at Latour de Carol is a wondrous thing — so much so that you might think that a separate, and completely insane, committee was responsible for naming and/or numbering each one.

We're going to try to explain how it works. But, be warned, this is complicated, nerdy and ridiculous. If you like that sort of thing, read on. If not, you may prefer to skip this section!

Before we dive in, I think we need to talk a bit about quais and voies.

If you learned a bit of French at school, you'll probably remember that quai means "platform". 

And voie, in this context, is usually translated as "track".

At Latour de Carol, there are:

• Six passenger-accessible voies (tracks), numbered 19, 17, 1/2, A, 4 and 6

• Three quais (platforms), numbered 1, 1 bis, and 2.

Confused already? Good.

If you come from Britain, you might not be familiar with this system of numbering platforms and tracks separately.

On the other hand if you have travelled by train in some other European countries, you might have encountered this system before.

I'm going to stick my neck out here and say that the just-number-the-platforms-and-be-done-with-it system, as used in Britain and elsewhere, is far superior. The idea of using separate track and platform numbers, as used at Latour de Carol (but not consistently at other French stations), is confusing, unnecessary, and unhelpful.

Platform 6

Platform 6 is a standard-gauge platform, served by French SNCF TER regional trains running to and from Toulouse-Matabiau.

Platform A

Platform A is an Iberian-gauge platform, served by Spanish RENFE / Rodalies de Catalunya trains running to and from Barcelona.

Platform 17

Platform 17 is a metre-gauge, third-rail platform, served by the French SNCF Train Jaune services to and from Villefranche-Vernet-les-Bains.

Platform 1/2

It's not entirely clear whether this standard-gauge platform is platform ½, in the style of Harry Potter's platform 9¾ at London King's Cross, or just an admission that no-one really knows whether this is Platform 1 or Platform 2. In any case it's the departure and arrival point for SNCF Intercités overnight trains to and from Paris Austerlitz.

Platform 4

This is another standard-gauge platform that isn't in current use, but we suspect it could be used as an alternative to Platform 6 for the Toulouse trains, if ever the stationmaster felt like shaking things up a bit.

Platform 19

This is another metre-gauge, third-rail platform that's not in active use but could be used as an alternative to Platform 19 for the Train Jaune.

*Linguistic note: at Latour de Carol, as you sometimes see in other European railway stations (but never, I think, in Britain), a distinction is made between track numbers and platform numbers. Under this utterly confusing system, a single platform (if it is an island platform) may serve two tracks — one on each side of the platform. While this does, admittedly, make some logical sense, it's a terrible system from the perspective of people trying to navigate the station or understand on which platform they can expect to find their train. Signs and announcements have two, parallel, and often quite unconnected numbering systems to deal with — and with inconsistent translations, too. The signs at Latour de Carol use"quai" to refer to the platform number, and "voie" to refer to the track number. Yet the SNCF app, in its English version, uses "platform" to refer to what is really the track (or "voie") number. Utterly baffling.

Things to do and see near La Tour de Carol station

If you're travelling between France and Spain via La Tour de Carol, you're going to have some time to kill thanks to the so-bad-it-almost-looks-deliberate lack of coordination between the French and Spanish trains.

First