29 October 2019

Dans le TGV Atlantique

To get to Paris-CDG airport (which we used to call by the name of a nearby town, Roissy [rwah-'see], but which Americans seem to just call CDG), I normally take the high-speed train called the TGV Atlantique. It's direct from the airport to the city of Tours, 40 miles or so west of Saint-Aignan.


Walt drives me over to Tours, and comes to pick me up there when I return from my trip. TGV stands for train à grande vitesse. Here's what the interior of a car looks like. On October 9, I sat in first class, and there were very few other passengers in the car with me.



To go from Roissy to Tours (the TGV station for Tours is called Saint-Pierre-des-Corps, which is the name of a suburb of the city that is famous as a big rail yard), the train goes south around Paris on the east side of the city — the airport is northeast of Paris — then west along the south side of the city, all at low speed because the route takes it through the suburbs.



As it leaves the southwestern suburbs of Paris, it picks up speed and rolls across the landscape toward Tours at nearly 200 mph. The TGV trip from the airport takes less than two hours. Driving from Saint-Aignan to Roissy can take three or four hours, depending on traffic.


The TGV route takes passengers through the area known as La Beauce, which is France's bread basket. It's a flat region given over to wheat fields, and dotted with towns and villages. A friend of ours who lives outside Urbana, Illinois, on the North American prairie, took the TGV from Paris to Tours a few years ago and said she was surprised to see that this part of France looked so much like the Illinois prairie.


There are a lot of éoliennes in the Beauce — they're called windmills or wind turbines in English. In French they are also called aérogénérateurs, because they turn wind energy into electricity. I count 18 of them in the photo above.


To pass the time while on the train, I enjoy taking photos of the countryside (you can click on or "unpinch" the images to enlarge them). There are a few picturesque villages along the TGV Atlantique route (the train continues on to Bordeaux, which is on the coast). I've tried to figure out what village the one above might be, but without success. It's not far north of Vouvray (famous for white wines), which is more or less a suburb of the city of Tours. Any ideas?

10 comments:

  1. Wow, I did not know your TGV travel at about 320 km/h.

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    1. Andrew, that's why it is called TGV = VHS = Very High Speed!

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    2. Walt and I once had the privilege of riding in the locomotive of a TGV between Paris and Nantes. We were in the driver's cabin and could observe his actions and see the speedometer (it was a work "perk" for W. and I was allowed to go for the ride with him). I remember that we hit 305 kph. I think that officially, the TGV runs at 300 kph (199 mph) when there are passengers aboard. The record speed attained by a TGV (sans passagers) was 575 kph in 2007.

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  2. Serait-il possible d'identifier l'église de ce petit villsge dont l'architecture est caractéristique, puisque le toit du transept [?] est beaucoup plus élevé que celui de la nef?

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    1. According to the camera's timestamp, I took the photo at 12:23, and the train arrived at SPdC at 12:59. So what village was about 35 minutes north of Tours? I've looked at Google Maps and Géoportail, but I haven't yet found a village with a church that looks like that one.

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  3. Learned a new word (éoliennes) - thanks!

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    1. The spot where I took the photos is called un parc d'éoliennes, I believe.

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  4. Yes, I was also going to say thanks for éoliennes, though aérogénérateurs seems probably easier to remember.

    I love high speed rail and that first pic. I'm so glad we have high speed trains between LA and SF, San Diego and Vegas...Oh wait, we have Amtrak going 50 mph.

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  5. Even the Amtrak high-speed on the east coast runs slow because the road bed is so bad and old. On the TGV between Bordeaux and Paris, I was amazed at how smooth the ride was, which goes to show -- it's important to build and maintain good infrastructure.

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    1. Amen. And it's important to maintain good relations with the cheminots (railway workers). A lot of them have been out on strike this week, protesting the Macron government's retirement system reforms. It seems to me that everything that can be done to keep the trains running smoothly should be done. Otherwise, people have no choice but to drive their cars a lot more, causing more pollution.

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