It’s coming up on the end of the month and hence another big announcement from the single-minded fanatics at the SNCF (French national railways) and this month it’s Barcelona.

Starting in April French TGVs will extend their averous reach beyond the current Catalonian hub at Figueres where for the moment you have to change trains and, if you like, take in the eccentric museum that native son Salvador Dali designed in homage to Salvador Dali. The current journey, not counting whatever time you need to genuflect at the Dali ego emporium, is about eight hours and that reduces in April to a very manageable six hours and twenty minutes.

Now that would be a decidedly satisfying portion of TGV travel news were it coming from any source other than the SNCF, which will lay down a high speed route to any gathering larger than a menage-à-trois if it stays still long enough. So naturally this logistical and engineering miracle combines with SNCF’s new border line unveiled in January to connect Barcelona to Perpignan, Narbonne, Montpellier, Nimes and Valence in France and Figueres and Girona in Spain.

And that’s it. Except that it’s not. Also starting in April France welcomes Spain’s version of the TGV on routes between Barcelona and Toulouse.

That finally is all the TGV news from France for this month, apart from the announced high-speed connection from Paris to Nice, starting in 2015, but I’ll save that for then.