Running & Reading in Rennes: Some Notes on French Trains

Train station in Carcassonne.

Note: this is a bonus entry for my dad because he loves trains.

Power cars for a TGV train.

TGV station in Avignon.

All trains in France are managed by the national rail company, SNCF. There are basically three types of passenger trains. First are the electric long-distance high-speed TGVs. They usually run at between 180 and 200 miles per hour, although in some parts of France, these trains use tracks that haven't been upgraded to handle those kinds of speeds. For instance, the last part of the journey between Paris and Rennes is on conventional tracks and so the train has to slow down to about 100 or 120 miles per hour. However, the French government is currently upgrading those tracks (and many others throughout France) so that by 2014, the roughly 200-mile long trip from central Paris to Rennes will take one hour and twenty-four minutes. The TGV network is quite extensive, but almost all of it runs through Paris. It's very difficult to take a TGV train cross-country without either passing through or changing stations in Paris. Many of our journety this year were on TGVs. In general, the TGV trains are the fanciest cars with first- and second-class options and a bar car. Some of them even provide WiFi service.

Train station in Bordeaux. A TER train is on the left;
an Intercites train on the right.

Second, there are the Intercites trains. These trains serve medium- and long-distance routes not served by the TGVs. They use older, pre-TGV cars (mostly from the 80s) and while comfortable, they're generally not as nice as the TGVs - there's no bar car, for instance, just a guy who comes down the aisle with a snack cart with things for you to purchase. They also aren't high-speed (although they still can go pretty fast - over 100 miles an hour). We only took two of this kind of train, both at the very end of our time in France: from Nantes to Toulouse (about a six hour ride) and from Paris to Bayeux (about an hour and a half ride).

Inside of a TER train.

Finally, there are the regional TER trains. These are smaller, less fancy trains that don't require a reservation (unlike the first two kinds) and mainly serve the small towns of one region (although some run from region to another). They're more like US commuter trains, although probably a bit nicer - no assigned seats, no snack car of any kind, and (in our experience) used by a lot of high-school and college kids to get from home to school. Because they stop in many towns, they can't go as fast as the other types of trains and journeys can be a bit long. We also took many of these trains on our various trips this year and Lisa took TER trains almost every week when she went to Vitre to tutor/babysit the Romanian girls.