OK, so a bit of a (structured) railway rant coming up!

At the @beuc event in Paris today I was asked by someone from UFC Que Choisir if I had listed up all the things I would improve in French rail

I hadn't this morning

But I have now 😅

Blog post 👇
https://jonworth.eu/fixing-frances-railways-what-would-i-do/

Summarised in the 🧵

1. Sort out the timetables

Timetables in France are universally terrible. Get rid of the gaps in the middle of the day. Run what the Germans or Swiss would call a Taktfahrplan.

2. Coordinate long distance and regional trains

Make sure TER trains depart major stations AFTER TGVs have arrived there, rather than before. And that might mean no more need for 2 TGVs a day to places like Remiremont

3. Abolish compulsory seat reservations on TGVs and Intercités

Compulsory reservation, and the absence of non-reservation alternatives, limits the flexibility of the system. Good railways like Austria and Switzerland don't do it, and nor should France.

5. Not build any more beetroot stations, and better connect the existing ones

So called “beetroot stations” (gares des betteraves) are stations in the middle of nowhere on high speed lines, normally many kilometres from the cities they are supposed to serve - and with massive car parks. Stop planning rail infra like this - where passengers need cars to get to the stations!

6. Introduce a simple, national and general reduction card

Reduction cards for frequent rail travellers in France are fiendishly complex. There is the Carte Avantage (€49) and Carte Liberté (€399), and a slew of regional cards. It's damned hard to navigate!

7. Build the LGV Interconnexion Sud, and improve provincial TGV services

Trying to make trips in France between different parts of the country and not having to pass through Paris is never very simple. The Interconnexion Sud would simplify and speed up trips from the South West to the rest of the country, avoiding Paris

8. Get rid of ticket barriers at stations, and have platforms for departures set in timetables

When you go to a station in France you initially do not know what platform of your train as this is only announced 15-20 min ahead of departure. Put this in timetables like Germany or Austria do. And get rid of the ticket barriers at stations as these slow down boarding and are labour intensive.

9. Do something about dwell times at stations – especially for TGVs

This is particularly poor with double deck TGVs that only have a single door per carriage. High passenger numbers per door, narrow stairs, and poorly designed luggage racks mean it takes a very long time to board and especially to disembark a TGV.

10. Other annoyances

The interior of TGVs often aren't great

Accessibility of stations is often horrible (lifts particularly badly designed)

Most TGVs still do not accept bikes

SNCF Connect app still a mess

When you book a ticket via Paris, SNCF ticket does not work in RER or Metro

Windows of TER trains are often really grimy.

Cross border TER services at most borders v poor

Loads of superfluous announcements in trains

Maintenance of the traditional non high speed network is often poor

And there are good things. Engineering of TGVs. The LGV Mediteranée. Scenic routes. The jingle. Often decent prices.

But I was asked to list what I would fix. So that is what I wrote! 🙂

/fin

@jon Regarding your example "carte Avantage is useless in BFC", well that's unless you're going to Grand Est... which can mean "going further = paying less" 🙃

(for readers: Culmont-Chalindrey is the stop following Is-sur-Tille on the very same train, it's located in région Grand Est)

@Bossito I don’t think so. I think it’s political, not legal. Buy off regional politicians with these stations.

@jon I had always assumed that they were there to placate the local government. Otherwise many of these lines cross these areas with all the disruption that entails but without any upsides for them.

I suspect it works the same for the abundance of ‘airs’ along the route a peage. “Yes, we’re going to plonk six lanes of tarmac through your meadows but you can sell produits regionaux to all who use it”.

@jon Or simply reintroduce third class if you really want to offer the Ryanair experience.

@jon
A pleasure to read, thanks !
As a cyclist I would add that traveling with a bicycle has become extremely difficult.

@jon Getting on a duplex TGV with a baby/child in a pram is a pretty awful experience. Everything is too tight even for the most compact of travel prams. I assume there are carriages optimised for wheelchair users, but that doesn’t really help those with other mobility needs. (The stairs are pretty awkward for those who find walking difficult, and I seem to remember the toilets being upstairs so booking a downstairs seat doesn’t help.)

@jon @beuc Great list. I'd add:
• Don't change the reduction card system every few years (on top of them being, as you point out, ridiculously complex).
• The website. It's been a running joke for twenty-five years and it gets worse every time they update it. It's good that there are alternatives, but that's no excuse for this abomination.

@jon Petition to replace "Parkway" wherever it appears in UK station names with "Beetroot".

"This train is for Plymouth, stopping at Bristol Beetroot, Bristol Temple Meads, Tiverton Beetroot..."

@jon I like that you mentioned the jingle. I like it – i had it as my text message tone for a while, years ago. I'd been sitting in a deserted train station for entirely too long, listening to too many announcements about trains I wouldn't be taking, and I recorded it :)

@beuc @jon I seem to remember but could have imagined that Haute-Picardie was built as a middle-finger solution to the bitching between Amiens and Saint Quentin as to who was more deserving of a TGV, but I might be wrong. I occasionally had to collect people from there for work in Goyencourt and could quite happily sit and watch TGVs rocketing past. They're experimenting with request stops in the Correze at the moment: https://www.20minutes.fr/societe/4020599-20230126-nouvelle-aquitaine-arrets-train-demande-experimentes-petites-gares

@jon Je vote pour, Il faut signer où ?

@jon Honestly this one is tricky, because you'll never have point-to-point trains for every medium-sized city pair in France, at least not at a reasonable frequency.

So this means planning for timed connections between TGVs at one outlying station in Paris. That's probably Marne La Vallée, but it would need more platforms.

@jon In the blog you were mentioning that other train manufacturers build trains with better internal circulation but I think even Alstom does it better when it's for a foreign market? Or are their Italian trains also bad?

@pmdj Oh the disabled lift down into a Duplex looks hellish to use (the times I’ve seen it used)

@vdm That’s in my catch all point 10 ;-) I’m a cyclist myself but it doesn’t get to the top 10!

@jon I don’t necessarily agree. If there were no seat reservations compulsory, trains would probably be extremely packed like some ICEs here. I always found a more controlled way to sell tickets better to avoid people standing on the trains for hours and full trains cause delays.

@zemoko je crois il n’y a aucun politicien qui soutien tout cela. Malheureusement!

@jon @beuc Great blog post btw, nevermind my little nitpicks, but it would be amazing if SNCF could improve on all the points you mention. As you say, these are all things that other European railways already do better so it's far from impossible.

Frankly a railway combining TGV (or AVE) speed with Swiss ops would be awesome. But imho that's more likely to emerge in Italy ^^

@DiegoBeghin No. Run Lille - Rennes. Dijon - Lille. Metz - Bordeaux.

@jon Great list, thank you.

I'd add two and a half things:

- run more trains/connections that bypass Paris.
- (to France, not to SNCF): Make it easier for other companies to run on your line, so that there is price competition (on lines like Brussels - Paris) and so that it is easier for other train companies to bypass Paris (Frankfurt/Zürich - Barcelona and Brussels - Zürich/Marseille come to mind).

@awesomeknight Compulsory reservation changes how a rail firm thinks - they then think about filling each train, rather than thinking as a network. While it makes the individual train nicer it makes the network and flexibility worse.

@DiegoBeghin @beuc At least on Torino-Milano-Bologna-Firenze-Roma-Napoli it pretty much has already!

@jon @beuc I regularly take the train in France, I fully agree. Sometimes I forget that all these annoyances are not mandatory, it's only bad system design.
And the train situation in France rarely improves : mandatory check before accessing trains, less and less flexibility with TER, nominative tickets on TGV, beetroots stations replacing city center stations, no more free reimbursement/exchange of tickets, avg increase of prices far higher than inflation, etc

@jon Missing Lyon/Marseille there.

@jon Do you think the amount of tickets for a train should be limited then? I mean if you have 500 seats you can sell obviously 500 tickets for a certain route. Plus x tickets for those who want to stand anywhere?

@Squig Point 7. sort of covers the more trains not via Paris.

Re. competition - I really didn't want to get into that :-) It is tangentially mentioned in 10.!

@SonstHarmlos A beetroot station that *has a regular rail line* is passable. One that does not is not.

@PolGM Right. Same. I regularly take the train in France (especially Strasbourg-Dijon-Nuits sous Ravieres, and Nuits sous Ravieres-Bercy) and these things simple to solve (but not solved!) drive you mad!

@PGLux I did not say ban them! Not build new ones. And improve the existing ones!

@DiegoBeghin Sure. ALL of those.

Basically see French LGV as 4 and a half regions - Nord, Est, Sud Ouest and Sud Est (Lyon-Marseille) and Sud Est (Dijon-Mulhouse) - and connect all these parts together, via a completed Interconnexion around Paris.

@awesomeknight No I don't. Selling tickets for *a train* is wrong. You sell tickets for *a route*

@PGLux A little. Not much.

@PGLux Yes, sort of. But that's as if more passengers is a bad thing! Add capacity!

@PGLux Sure it's possible! Indeed it'd work especially well there! It would decrease overcrowding in the halls.

@PGLux @awesomeknight There are railways that handle overcrowding without putting a compulsory reservation on everything!

@henry79 Maximises capacity. But to me it makes no sense, as it brings other downsides!

@jon Yes, of course. I just wanted to simplify the post.

@jon @PGLux Okay, so the amount of tickets on the route is limited to the seat capacity + x. That’s good then.

@PGLux Both!

@jon @beuc I suspect that most of what’s wrong with the French railways comes from them optimising processes for their own operation rather than for passengers.

Mandatory reservation? Don’t have to run extra trains, just be sold out. Random timetable? Makes it easier to create and to dispatch crews and rolling stock. Close doors two minutes before
departure? More time for the departure procedure. Two hour transfer times? No need to deal with stranded passengers. It goes on.

@jon English announcements would be nice. German conductors are often made fun of for their very german english (Sänk ju for träweling...) but when I took the TGV they didn't even try...
Is that always the case or does it depend on the individual conductor?

@zugbindung It's pretty rare, but you do get it sometimes!

@jon Nice to know, thanks!

@zugbindung And I agree - people joke about DB English. But they try. SNCF tries much less. Oh and DB announcements are often useful. SNCF’s rather less!

@jon Yeah, you just feel a bit out of place if you have to use your remains of latin knowledge from school to understand what's going on. But that's France I guess. 😅

@jon @beuc @Alon My girlfriend has a suggestion on how to fix every other country’s trains: use the SNCF jingle

@jon I agree that it works in Austria and Switzerland but I highly doubt that it could be possible in France especially during the high peak that are Christmas holidays and each weekend on Summer holidays.
It happens that I took Intercités during this time period and ending up standing for 4hours was anything but pleasant. I had a seat reservation, most of the people didn't, and the train manager wasn't able to do anything about that...

@jon oh Jon, if only the SNCF could improve on just 10% of what you just listed I'd be happy as ever. But I also know this will most likely never happen 😅

@aliocha Becsuse SNCF runs too few trains. Because it’s aiming to fill those it has, not really running more.

@PGLux @aliocha The peaks are more accrue because no one uses the train everyday because you can’t because the timetables are shit. Start with better everyday timetables and get more daily train users!

@jon @PGLux I got your point and I partially agree : getting rid of compulsory seat reservation alone will not solve anything nor attract more riders if it ends up with crowded train.
If I do agree with better timetable, I don't see the link between having more daily users and having less peak on weekend/holidays.

@aliocha @PGLux A central problem in France, outside of weekends, is people do not use trains on an everyday basis - because you can't because the timetables are too awful. France could have higher daily rail usage if its timetables were better. If it did it'd have more trains in use, that it could then better re-deploy to cover peaks.

@jon suits arrivals, departures not so much. Maybe they're balancing both these requirements?

@jamesmorshead No. They don't think about coordinating departures *either*. it's as if TERs and TGVs are separate worlds.

@jon @PGLux most of the daily users are using local or regional trains. Yes timetable should be improved and leveled up to have a consistent offer all day long. But getting more regional trains will not improve the long distance / high speed trains, because the rolling stock is different and managed by different administration.