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   STRASBOURG: The sweeping cobblestone plaza that once greeted visitors exiting the 19th-century railway station here is now a vast sea of gravel and earth-moving equipment.In place of the sidewalks and taxi ranks, a 150-meter-long arcade of steel arches and scaffolds masks the station s original Renaissance-inspired facade.

The construction work is part of a 60 million, or about $80 million, metamorphosis of the Strasbourg station due to conclude this summer, when the French national rail operator SNCF introduces a new high-speed service to eastern France.It caps a five-year, 5 billion investment to extend the country s famed TGV network from Paris to the German border with trains traveling at speeds of up to 320 kilometers, or 200 miles, per hour.For Jean-Paul Manuel, a cab driver, the fast train is long overdue.

"I think it is scandalous that we haven t had a TGV before now," said Manuel, 48, who has watched for 25 years as France s high-speed rail network expanded to places like Lyon, Lille and Marseille, turning once-quiet provincial towns into thriving tourist destinations."This a European city," he said, referring to the European Parliament, which sits on the banks of the river Ill that meanders lazily through willow-lined embankments to the ancient timbered houses of the city s center."It s time for us to wake up and get moving." Beginning June 10, the new TGV Est Europ en line will nearly halve the current travel time between Strasbourg and Paris, to 2 hours and 20 minutes from 4 hours, and placing much of the Champagne-Ardennes region within comfortable commuting distance of the French capital.

The 300 kilometers of new high-speed track will bring other European cities closer, too, making the train a genuine alternative to air travel.For example, Frankfurt and Stuttgart, now a lumbering 6 hours from Paris by train, will be reachable in around 3 hours and 45 minutes.Manuel and other residents of this Alsatian city of 270,000 have high hopes for what the imminent arrival of the eastern high-speed link will mean for the local economy.

Strasbourg s hotel and tourism industry expects as many as 4.6 million visitors per year once TGV service begins, an increase of around 30 percent from 2006.A wave of construction and real estate speculation all along the new line is well under way.In Reims, soon a mere 45 minutes from Paris rather than the current 1 hour and 35 minutes, more than 80,000 square meters, or about 860,000 square feet, of new office space and hundreds of new homes have recently been built.

New convention centers and shopping centers are springing up in Metz and Nancy, while apartment prices in central Strasbourg have risen as high as 5,000 per square meter - on par with many Parisian neighborhoods.Fr d ric Neff, who manages a Strasbourg real estate agency, said that "locals have been snapping up property in anticipation of a TGV effect." He added: "People are hoping the train will make it more attractive for companies to open offices and send their employees here." Economists caution, however, that expectations of a high-speed boom may be overblown.Olivier Klein, a transport economist at the University of Lyon, said the growth experienced in other TGV cities like Marseille and Lille was the result of broader, multi-year urban renewal projects of which the high-speed links were an important part.

"There is a tendency to overvalue the effect of the train itself," Klein said.The French national rail operator, SNCF, and R seau Ferr de France, the state-owned track operator, have together paid 41 percent of the cost of the line, with the rest covered by the French and Luxembourg governments as well as the European Union.Guillaume Pepy, the SNCF chief executive, said 30 percent of a train ticket s price goes to cover track investment and maintenance charges, yet profit margins on the TGV service are around 12 percent.

"That is extremely high in the railway industry," Pepy said.Meanwhile, the option of reaching the region quickly by train is forcing airports to reinvent themselves.Air France, which operates the only scheduled air connection between Paris and Metz-Nancy-Lorraine Airport, will end its service when the TGV line cuts train travel to one and a half hours from 2 hours 45 minutes - resulting in a loss of 72,000 passengers per year, or one-fifth of the airport s total activity.

Miriam Decker, an airport spokeswoman, said Metz-Nancy hoped to offset this loss by luring low-cost airlines such as MyAir, an Italian carrier.In Strasbourg, where flights to and from Paris represent more than half of the air traffic, the airport expects to see its annual passenger count drop to as low as 1.5 million from 2 million last year when the TGV prompts Air France to cut its 12 daily flights to the city to eight..

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