Paris (AFP)

SNCF is celebrating the 40th anniversary of the TGV on Friday, an anniversary celebrated with Emmanuel Macron which will allow the company to forget about the pandemic while waiting for the arrival of the next generation of trains, while the competition is pointing its nose.

Launched by Georges Pompidou and built under Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, the TGV was inaugurated on September 22, 1981 by François Mitterrand.

It was orange, was traveling only 260 km / h, and the new line between Paris and Lyon was still unfinished.

But it already made it possible to save an hour compared to the 3 hours 40 minutes that the fastest trains then took, a journey reduced to 2 hours in 1983.

For the anniversary of its favorite train, SNCF has chosen to combine its celebration with Heritage Days, with a double exhibition at Gare de Lyon and at Ground Countrol - a former postal sorting hall located a stone's throw away - in Paris. .

"Patrick", the first TGV, exhibited at Gare de Lyon, February 25, 2020 in Saint-Denis, near Paris BERTRAND GUAY AFP

As a guest star at Gare de Lyon: Emmanuel Macron, whom we do not know what announcements he could make.

In any case, it will unveil a full-scale model of the TGV M motor, long called "TGV of the future", which the public company intends to put on track in 2024.

This new TGV ordered from Alstom will not be faster than the last trains running on the French network - 320 km / h -, but the SNCF wants it more comfortable, more capacity, more flexible, more ecological, more economical.

President Macron was last interested in the TGV on July 1, 2017. Freshly elected, he inaugurated the extension of the new line to Rennes.

If he hailed "a technological success", he also promised "not to relaunch large new projects but to undertake to finance the renewal of infrastructures".

Because the construction of 2,700 km of French high-speed lines (LGV) has weighed down the accounts of SNCF, whose enormous debt has long been worrying.

- Italian competition -

The rise of the TGV - first to Paris-Lyon, then to the Atlantic, the North, the Benelux and Great Britain, the South-East and the East - created a "two-speed SNCF "where he was the object of all the attentions to the detriment of the traditional network and the daily trains.

Priority has therefore been given in recent years to the maintenance of the existing one.

But most of the unserved elected officials have never ceased to claim "their" TGV, even though its arrival has raised property prices everywhere.

TGVs parked at Gare de Lyon, April 8, 2020 THOMAS COEX AFP / Archives

The tide is starting to turn, undoubtedly under the impetus of the ship-owner Jean Castex.

The Prime Minister, elected from Occitanie, has indeed relaunched the LGV Bordeaux-Toulouse and Montpellier-Perpignan projects.

With financing keys associating the State, local communities and Europe, but no longer the SNCF (which is content to buy the trains).

The TGV was, before the Covid-19 pandemic, a very profitable activity.

His birthday party allows him to escape a little from the current slump, while the great challenge of the national company is now to bring back passengers on the trains, and in particular the business clientele.

To complicate matters, competition should finally arrive on French railways: the red high-speed trains of the Italian company Thello (Trenitalia) are indeed expected on Paris-Lyon-Milan "before the end of the year".

They could be followed later to Lyon-Marseille by trains from the Spanish Renfe, then in the West by those of Le Train, a Charente company.

SNCF runs its TGVs to London, Brussels and Amsterdam via its subsidiaries Eurostar and Thalys, and to Germany, Switzerland, Italy and Spain with or without partnership with its European counterparts.

In the spring, it launched its low-cost Ouigo service between Madrid and Barcelona, ​​in Spain, against Renfe.

As for Alstom's TGV, it was exported to Spain, Korea, Italy and Morocco, as well as to the United States in a slower derivative version.

© 2021 AFP