In France it is still the age of the train
France’s railways are taking off. The National Assembly, prompted by President Macron, last month passed a bill to ban internal air services whose routes could be better served by trains. Short-haul flights will be halted in cases where a rival rail service can speed passengers between cities in less than two and a half hours.
The aim is to cut France’s carbon footprint, but the effect will only be felt on a small number of high-speed routes, such as Paris-Lyon, Paris-Nantes and Paris-Strasbourg.
Note the ubiquity of Paris in the calculation. Just as all roads led to Rome in classical times, so all high-speed lines in France lead to Paris. If you wish to go by rail from Nantes to Lyon, or from Lyon to Bordeaux, the only viable way is via the capital.
Four hours as the cut-off point for domestic flights – which is what was originally intended – would have brought Marseille, Toulouse, Nice, Perpignan and Biarritz into the mix. But the airline industry, including Air France, in which the state recently invested €4 billion, was never going to stand for that.
Not full steam ahead, then for the chemin de fer, but not a train-wreck either.
The French are extremely proud of their railways, which are state-owned under the banner of SNCF. In normal times, the company’s trains à grande vitesse (TGVs) carry more than 110 million passengers a year at speeds of up to 320 kph (200 mph), while three times that number travel annually on local, or TER, services.
Some 15,000 services per day of all types operate on a network of more than 30,000 kms (19,000 miles) – roughly twice that of the UK. In Britain, the fastest trains, other than Eurostar (55 per cent owned by SNCF) rarely exceed 125 mph, and less than half the routes nationwide are designated high-speed, or even electrified.
SNCF Group, the French holding company, which supplies rail systems to 120 countries around the world, has a global workforce of 275,000 people, 54,000 of whom work on the domestic network.
But all is not well at corporate HQ, a lavish complex, known as Campus Etoiles, in Saint Denis, just north of Paris. Company president Jean-Pierre Farandou, a 40-year veteran of the industry, appointed to the top job in 2019, is having to deal not just with major restructuring and ongoing industrial unrest, but the impact of Covid-19, which for the best part of a year has seen a dramatic fall in the number of both services and customers.
Whereas strikes last year are estimated to have cost the company €400 million, the pandemic wiped out anticipated revenues of €6.8 billion.
Last October, Moody’s said the outlook for SNCF was “stable”. But by December, Fitch followed S&P in finding it “negative”. All three agencies acknowledged that the railway behemoth was not in any danger of going bust. The French state would never countenance such a humiliation. But there is little doubt that the group’s total adjusted debt, which at the end of 2020 exceeded €38 billion (£33bn) is a millstone round its neck.
Twelve months previously, at the end of 2019, the net debt total had reached €60.3bn, at which point the Macron government stepped in, effectively writing off €25bn of the total. Unfortunately, in the year that followed, with Covid surging across France, the volume of debt rose again, by €2.8bn. Borrowing remained a constant. €6.8bn was raised on the capital markets not only to fund growth in profitable sectors (mainly carriage-building and consultancy) but to compensate for a decline in overall revenues of 14 per cent, leading to a net loss for the year of €3bn.
And yet and yet … though railway workers – les cheminots – seem to spend half their time on strike (protesting against proposed changes to their pension schemes) and their customers may grumble endlessly about ticket prices and the unfathomability of the online reservations system, both sides are agreed that SNCF is at the centre of France’s story in the 21st century and that its mighty TGVs (up to half a kilometer in length) are among the nation’s crown jewels.
They look across at the UK and shake their heads. How can the British – who invented railways! – have ended up with a jigsaw of competing companies, mostly-foreign owned, that never seem to stay in business for more than a few years at at a time and are focused overwhelmingly on profit. How is it, they want to know, that 60 per cent of British trains still run on diesel and how can it be that, in 2021, there is still debate over the wisdom of high-speed services?
They have a point, of course. For all the dead weight under which it functions, the French railway system still exudes a certain undeniable dynamism. New, even faster TGVs are starting to come on-stream, with speeds that could hit 350 kph. The first orders for hydrogen-fuelled locomotives have been placed with the French train builder Alstom, to enter service in less-populated areas in 2025. New links are at last opening up in the heartlands that will enable high-speed trains to reach Dijon, Mulhouse, Nice and Monte Carlo. A private company recently announced a route that will operate between Bordeaux, Clermont-Ferrand and Lyon, with others expected to follow, possibly linking Bordeaux, Montpellier and Marseille.
Eurostar, by contrast, has rather hit the buffers, at least for now. The UK government sold its 40 per cent stake in the pioneering cross-Channel rail company in 2015 and says that shutdowns and losses arising from Covid are a matter for the French – this despite the fact that, prior to the pandemic, services to Paris, Brussels and, most recently, Amsterdam were carrying close to 12 million passengers annually, more than half of them British. Downing Street and Whitehall, in the post-Brexit era, seem to have washed their hands of the whole bally business, giving zero support to plans for additional services to Cologne, Frankfurt, Lyon and Bordeaux.
Meanwhile, SNCF is exploring the possibility, longer term, of more through services to Germany and Switzerland, and there is talk, too, of expanding sleeper services to Berlin, Vienna, Prague, Madrid and Rome. Strange though it may seem right now, with the national flag-carrier submerged in debt and with hundreds of services suspended due to Covid, in France it is still the age of the train.