“Sabotage”, “massive attack”, “rail chaos”. These were not the words I wanted to wake up to in my charming hotel room in charming Nantes on the day of the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Paris. I’d taken the opportunity of the women’s football group stages being played in the western French city to explore a part of the country I did not yet know, and had been enjoying the quirky vibes and excellent wine bars of the birthplace of Jules Verne. Yet the epic journey before me that morning was less Around the World in Eighty Days and more “Can I get to Montparnasse before Monday?”
Overnight, an as-yet-unidentified group of saboteurs had set fire to fibre-optic cables at the key nerve centres that connect Paris to the north, south, east and west of the country; only in the southeast had they failed. With these acts of arson, they had paralysed a nation as the eyes of the world turned towards it. Havoc seemed to reign, with trains across the country cancelled and up to 800,000 people affected. Montparnasse was particularly hard hit — just my luck.
My train was due to leave Nantes at 5:08 pm, arriving in Paris just after 7 pm, after which I planned to hoof it to a friend’s apartment in the 11th Arrondissement to catch the delightfully bonkers extravaganza taking place along the length of a heavily fortified river Seine. It was perhaps hubris to attempt a journey into the capital in the minutes before an opening ceremony that has left most of the city shuttered behind metal grates with security ramped up to its highest possible level. But I had booked my trip based on an unwavering faith in a rail network that I rely on for the vast majority of my travel.
I cannot drive, and in eight years of living in France, I have never once considered taking a domestic flight. Besides, as of last year, any air journey that could be otherwise achieved in less than two and a half hours by train is banned. Thanks to the TGV (train à grande vitesse) as high-speed rail is known here, I can reach Marseille in just over three hours from Paris, Strasbourg in an hour and 45 minutes and Montpellier in three and a half. The TGV has taken me to the Alps, to the Atlantic coast, to the Pyrenees and beyond into Spain, Italy, Germany, Switzerland and Britain. I once had a colleague who occasionally commuted to Paris from Bordeaux, a journey of 600 kilometres.
Destroying the cables on which high-speed rail runs is like slicing through the heart of France, because the TGV is France. The network is an engineering and social marvel, making an enormous country functionally much smaller, and giving French people access to an intimate knowledge of the many corners of this geographically diverse nation. They are doing so in ever greater numbers — turning away from carbon-intensive air journeys and inclined to holiday chez eux, a record-breaking 24 million people travelled by high-speed rail in France last summer during the sacred holiday season.
There are few more pleasant ways to travel than by TGV. The seats are spacious, the air conditioning is crisp, the bar is stocked with wine and snacks — even the low-cost OUIGO service is entirely comfortable. All services offer the stunning pleasure of the French countryside racing past your window.
All this is of course inconceivable in Australia, which has spent four decades and $150 million studying the feasibility of high-speed rail without building a centimetre of it. Over the same period, France has rolled out 2,600 kilometres of track serving 200 stations. It’s a fact I am all too familiar with as someone who crawls up to Wodonga on a V/Line from Melbourne whenever I am back in Australia, praying not to be chucked off and stuck on a bus at Shepparton. On the TGV, the journey would take just over an hour, and I could take my dog.
The TGV is not perfect. It can be ruinously expensive at peak travel times, and I have heard horror stories of being stuck on broken-down trains in the middle of nowhere with non-functioning air conditioning and no water. Still, I had never had a bad French rail experience until last Friday.
As 5 pm approached, I updated my train app with dread. As far as I could see, all services to Paris so far had been cancelled or indefinitely delayed. At the station, red-coated rail employees joined the army of purple-vested Olympics greeters in managing the growing crowds of people wanting to know if they would be able to get out of Nantes that day. All trace of any journey to Paris had been wiped from the departure boards. I was first told that my train had the “best chance” of leaving on time, then that it would definitely leave at 6 pm. “But my app says 7,” I told the agent. “Ignore the app!” he commanded with supreme confidence.
Alas, the app was right and my SNCF friend was wrong; we did indeed have to wait until 7. Most of my fellow rejected 5pmers took this in good humour, with the exception of one tourist couple who seemed, with even more hubris than I, to have tickets to the opening ceremony itself. They asked every red jacket in sight to let them board, then they tried the purple vests; they waggled their fingers, they asked to speak to a manager. Another glorious thing about France: this is a country where “I want to speak to your manager” never works. They were rebuffed like the rest of us.
Denied boarding on the 6 pm, I ducked out to a cheery guinguette on a boat moored behind the station in the river Erdre and polished off a cheese plate for two while watching the pre-ceremony show. At ten past seven, I strolled back to the station and onto a train bound, finally, for Montparnasse. It was the opening day of the highest-security Olympic Games of all time, peak holiday season, the rail network was subject to the most serious attack in its history, and my train was… two hours late.
We rolled at a leisurely pace through western France, the conductor informing us with an air of profound disappointment that we were forced to travel on the “classic” lines, the TGV infrastructure still too damaged to use. All was fixed by Sunday, but for one weekend, France was having to deal with the privation of life without high-speed rail.
