The Lille–Fontinettes railway is a French railway which runs from
Lille-Flandres station to
Les Fontinettes station near
Calais
Calais ( , , traditionally , ) is a port city in the Pas-de-Calais department, of which it is a subprefecture. Although Calais is by far the largest city in Pas-de-Calais, the department's prefecture is its third-largest city of Arras. The p ...
. Electrified double track it is long.
Completed in 1848, it was the first railway to reach the coastal port of Calais. The
Paris-Lille railway had reached Lille from Paris two years previously.
In 1993, it was bypassed by the
LGV Nord
The Ligne à Grande Vitesse Nord (North High-Speed Line), typically shortened to LGV Nord, is a French -long high-speed rail line, opened in 1993, that connects Paris to the Belgian border and the Channel Tunnel via Lille.
With a maximum speed ...
high-speed line running from
Lille-Europe
Lille-Europe station (French: ''Gare de Lille-Europe'') is a SNCF railway station in Lille, France, on the LGV Nord high-speed railway. The station is primarily used for international Eurostar and long-distance SNCF TGV services, although som ...
to
Calais-Fréthun and the
Channel Tunnel
The Channel Tunnel (french: Tunnel sous la Manche), also known as the Chunnel, is a railway tunnel that connects Folkestone ( Kent, England, UK) with Coquelles (Hauts-de-France, France) beneath the English Channel at the Strait of Dove ...
. The main traffic today is freight and local
TER Hauts-de-France
Hauts-de-France (; pcd, Heuts-d'Franche; , also ''Upper France'') is the northernmost region of France, created by the territorial reform of French regions in 2014, from a merger of Nord-Pas-de-Calais and Picardy. Its prefecture is Lille. The ...
passenger trains.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Lille-Fontinettes railway
Railway lines in Hauts-de-France
Standard gauge railways in France
Railway lines opened in 1848