Free Republic

Rail workers across France have gone on strike for the first day of a three-month rolling walkout, the latest and potentially biggest battle over labor laws in the country since President Emmanuel Macron took office last May promising to transform the jobs market. Train services have been severely disrupted, with around 87% of high-speed trains and 80% of regional services canceled Tuesday, according to SNCF, France's state-owned rail company. Eurostar services were also affected, with one in four services from Paris canceled. High-speed Thalys trains towards Belgium and the Netherlands were operating almost as normal, but there were no services...

Commuters on a new high-speed rail line in France got to race a Dassault Rafale fighter jet, which is pretty cool. I would like to snark how American it is of them, but America doesn’t really do high-speed rail. To celebrate a new line between Connerré and Cesson-Sévigné, the French rail service was joined by the French Air Force, with a Dassault Rafale fighter jet following along the new train, looking cool and giving commuters the impression that they were mere pawns in France’s multi-transport racing gambit. In the video from Puissance Française (French Power) on YouTube, you can also...

The French government has confirmed that it will order 15 high-speed TGV trains in a bid to prevent the historic Alstom train-building plant from closing. The announcement was made by France’s secretary of state for industry Christophe Sirugue on a visit to the Alstom factory in Belfort, eastern France. Normally, the state-owned rail operator SNCF would be in charge of ordering new trains, but given the plight of the Belfort factory and the small matter of a looming presidential election, the government has chosen to act on its own. …

The Senate Finance Committee on Thursday announced its opposition to the construction of more high-speed TGV routes in France for at least the next 15 years, targeting three planned high speed rail routes in particular. A report into infrastructure financing has advised against pouring money into “projects where the socioeconomic viability is doubtful, the costs are unreasonable and the finance plan is still unknown”. Plans for LGV lines connecting Bordeaux with Toulouse and Dax, Poitiers with Limoges, and Montpellier with Perpignan were singled out as costly and unnecessary. …

SNIPPET: "A French couple arrested in connection with a series of anarchist attacks on the country's rail network have been linked by the FBI to a bomb attack in New York." ARTICLE SNIPPET: "French anti-terrorist police are holding 10 alleged members of a violent anarchist movement suspected of sabotaging power cables on high speed TGV train lines. But it now transpires that the alleged culprits were netted thanks to information from the FBI, which allegedly linked two of them to the home-made bomb attack on an army recruitment centre in New York's Times Square in March. Julien Coupat, 34, the...

PARIS, Feb 14, 2007 (AFP) - France's superfast TGV train has broken its own world record by hitting a peak speed of 553 kilometres (331 miles) per hour, a French newspaper reported Wednesday. The SNCF rail company, the network operator RFF and Alstom, the TGV's manufacturer, all refused to confirm the report in Le Parisien, which comes several months before an official attempt to set a new rail record. An Alstom spokesman said only that the Train a Grande Vitesse (TGV) was carrying out test runs ahead of an official bid -- scheduled for April -- to beat its own...