How France became a world champion of high-speed rail

Local France

19-06-2025

In 2024, the French rail network carried nearly 130 million passengers - another record-breaking year for SNCF as
more and more people take the train
in what the network describes as a 'golden age for rail'.
French trains are popular - an Ifop
study
found that almost half of all French people travelled by TGV in the last 12 months, and while cars are still king in France, the study also found that the French prefer to travel by train rather than plane for distances below 500 km.
Meanwhile, a separate
study
found that 78 percent of French people travel by train 'from time to time' - and there's no evidence that the somewhat robust attitude of French rail unions to negotiation
is putting passengers off
.
Listen to the team at The Local discuss France's rail success in the latest episode of the Talking France podcast - download
here
or listen on the link below
The French rail network is not only popular, it's fast - France also holds several international train speed records, the most recent being set in 1990 (515.3 km/h) and 2007 (574.8 km/h). A standard Paris to Marseille TGV trip will commonly reach speeds of 320km/h. (A side note for train fans - Japan's maglev train L0 Series, which achieved 604km/h in 2015, is technically a magnetic levitation track, which means that France holds onto its record.)
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One factor that helped France to build and expand its high-speed rail network is that its construction costs are, relatively speaking, quite low.
The
Transit Costs project
database of projects in 59 countries and over 20,000km of urban rail found that France spends on average €29.71 million per km of high-speed rail line built.
While that is slightly above Spain (€21.75 million/km), it's one-tenth of the spend in the UK (€207.9 million/km average).
So what's behind the success story of French rail, especially the high-speed TGV (
Train à Grande Vitesse
) services that were launched in the 1980s?
Presentation of the TGV on June 15th, 1980 in Chantilly. (Photo by AFP)
We spoke to rail experts about some of the factors that have enabled this success.
State involvement
"France's high-speed rail network has been incredibly successful," Rick Harnish, the executive director of the non-profit
High-Speed Rail Alliance
, told The Local.
Harnish, who lives in Chicago, fondly remembers his first trip on a French TGV. "Our first trip was from Gare de Lyon to Marseille... I thought I understood what high-speed rail was about, and now I really do."
"[To build a high-speed network], the most important thing you need is an entity of some nature whose clear job it is to make it happen.
"The second step is that the entity needs to have the resources - both financial and personnel - to be successful. And third, you need a strong commitment from the government to get through challenges. In the case of France, that entity is the French national railroad, SNCF," Harnish said.
Having a centralised, state-controlled rail operator is also important when it comes to building costs.
France has been able to build high-speed lines relatively cheaply and quickly, particularly in comparison to countries like the US and UK, which has meant the rapid expansion of the network.
Alon Levy, a Fellow in the Transportation and Land Use program of the NYU Marron Institute and author of the blog
Pedestrian Observations,
noted France has opted for a more traditional model, rather than a 'globalised' one, which is popular in the Anglophone world.
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"The globalised system means you try to involve international consultancies more in planning, so you use bigger, more expensive contracts," Levy explained.
"France does not work that way (...) and as a result, French management costs for subway projects are between five to 10 percent of their hard costs, whereas in the US this starts at 20 percent and just goes up. Keeping experienced managers in the public sector to supervise private sector designers saves money."
France also harnesses its in-house expertise for public transport projects. Levy gave the example of the Grand Paris Express, the capital region's ambitious Metro expansion, to build four new fully automated Metro lines at the edges of the 'greater Paris region'
READ MORE:
Grand Paris Express: The French capital's ambitious expansion plan
"The
idea
is that after they're done planning and building, the bureaucracy will be used to build similar things in the main provincial cities. They realise they have this very competent project delivery vehicle, so might as well use it for things beyond Paris," the researcher added.
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Legal structures
A slight authoritarian streak may also help things along, according to Yves Crozet, who now serves as the mayor of the Saint-Germain-la-Montagne commune in the Loire département in central France, who spent most of his career teaching and researching transport economics.
Crozet noted that in France, a public body is created by the government to run the transport project. With the Grand Paris Express, the public enterprise Société de Grand Paris was created with the right to collect taxes and raise funds, and then decide between construction bids for the lines.
After the public consultation process, French transport projects receive a
déclaration d'utilité publique
(DUP, or declaration of public utility).
Once this has been activated, purchase of land can begin - with compulsory purchases permitted if people don't want to sell up to the railways.
"Building high-speed rail in Germany, for example, is harder because it is more difficult to oppose people who do not want to sell their land. Here in France, we are in a centralised system, it's a little authoritarian."
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Geography
Then some factors might be considered more luck than judgement, such as France's geography.
Crozet said: "The first reason TGV has done well in France is geography. We have a central capital city, and the other cities are smaller.
"If you want to go from Lyon or Bordeaux to Paris, then you need to travel a long distance, so it makes sense to build a high-speed network. For example, in Switzerland, you don't need high-speed rail, as it is a small country."
This was echoed by Alon Levy, who noted that French high-speed lines tend to be built on agricultural land and involve few tunnels, making them cheaper to construct.
It also helped that France had a vast rail network already, which meant that as the TGV was being developed it was often a case of adapting existing lines, rather than building tracks from scratch.
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The best versus the rest
But is it fair to say French rail is great - or more accurate to say that French high-speed rail is great?
One key fact about the French rail network is that the country is home to over 27,000 km of train tracks - and of that, 2,800km is high-speed rail, or
lignes à grande vitesse.
That means that nine-tenths of the country's rail does not offer the impressive TGV services, but is a mixture of TER local trains and commuter networks, like the Paris region's Transilien line.
"France is really good at transport in cities and for travelling between cities, but it is awful if you need to go from one town to another town," Jon Worth, railway commentator and
blogger
, who is based in rural Burgundy, told The Local.
READ MORE:
ANALYSIS: Will France's rural rail networks be revived?
"France de facto decided to prioritise Paris, and it is difficult to tell what has been an explicit decision and what has been unintended consequences of perhaps well-intended decisions," Worth said.
When building the high-speed network, SNCF opted for a 'hub and spoke' model, connecting major cities to the capital, as well as an airline model, where passengers must reserve seats.
"This has turned into profit-maximising, and there is no flexibility in the system. Imagine: you're based in Paris and your grandma is in Toulon. Your grandma falls ill, and you need to travel tomorrow…chances are you won't be able to do it because every train will be full.
"SNCF is proud of the fact that most of its TGV seats are full and almost half of its trains sell out, but from a railway perspective, that means that the public cannot get to where they need to be at the last second. There is no spare capacity in the system.
"Then on the other hand, SNCF says they don't have the money to maintain the tracks for the old
lignes classiques,
the historic network of non-high-speed tracks which serve the local TER services.
"While the rest of Europe discusses reopening old regional lines, France is talking about how they are in danger of closing.
"So France might be better than other countries, like the UK, at high-speed rail, but I would argue that the UK is better at commuter and regional rail than France. Instead of investing in high-speed, the UK has tried to ring every last bit of capacity out of its classic network.
"This means that between two medium-sized towns in UK, you might have a train once an hour, while in France, if you want to do the same thing, there might be three trains a day.
"Ultimately, it depends on how countries set their priorities, and my preference would be the German strategy over the French one. Even though trains might be behind schedule, they do run regional trains around the clock.
"In France, a two-class system has been created on French railways. Anyone will take the TGV, including rich people, but that cannot be said for the TER, which is mainly people who are too young or too old to drive, or too poor to have a car."
"I would take the view that it should be normal for any person to take any type of train," Worth said.
What do you think of France's railway system? Share your thoughts in the comments below.