How reliable is the Intercités de nuit – Rodalies de Catalunya connection at Latour de Carol?

Question

The Man in Seat 61 describes a partially-overnight connection between Paris and Barcelona:

• Take the Intercités de nuit from Paris, arriving 10:07 at Latour de Carol
• Change onto a Rodalies de Catalunya regional train, departing 10:30 and heading to Barcelona-Sants.

This gives 23 minutes for making the change – plenty if the sleeper train arrives on time, but without much leeway for a delay. To make matters worse, the next train leaving the station is 3 hours later, which is quite a significant amount of time. Thus, I would like to know how reliable one can expect this connection to be. In particular:

• what delay is typical of a Intercités de nuit train? Is it possible to see the historical data on this?
• does the Rodalies de Catalunya train operate specifically with the intention of connecting with the night train, i.e. if the French train is projected to arrive slightly too late to make the connection work, would the Spanish train be likely to wait to avoid stranding the passengers for 3 hours?

Answer 1

To answer the second question - the Rodalies train won't wait for a delayed sleeper as that line operates as part of the Barcelona suburban network as it gets closer in to Barcelona where timetabling is tight and a delay could have a knock-on effect across the entire network (which it frequently does, but that's another story).

If you particularly want to travel overnight on a sleeper, but don't want to possibly have to wait around for two hours at a station, another option could be taking the sleeper from Paris to Cerbère, and travelling from there via Rodalies into Barcelona. There's also the possibility of delay on this route but both Cerbère and Portbou are reasonably sized to while away an hour or two, and from Portbou there is a train at least every hour into Barcelona. The route from Paris is the same as far as as Toulouse, but you wouldn't go through the heart of the Pyrenees. This would get you into Barcelona slightly earlier - Passeig de Gràcia station at 1305, compared to 1350 at Pl Catalunya for the train via Latour de Carol.