Why French People Are Obsessed With Trains (And Always Complaining About Them)

If you spend any time in France, you’ll notice something: French people have a complicated relationship with trains.

On one hand, they’ll tell you trains are essential, ecological, and far more civilized than flying. On the other, mention the SNCF (the national rail company) at a dinner party and watch the room erupt. Everyone has a story. Everyone has a grievance. Everyone has been stranded somewhere.

This relationship — passionate, exasperated, deeply personal — says a lot about France itself. Let me explain why.

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Why Trains Matter So Much in France

France isn’t a huge country. And unlike the US or Australia, distances between major cities are manageable by train. Paris to Lyon: two hours by TGV (the high-speed train). Paris to Bordeaux: two hours. Paris to Marseille: three hours.

That changes the calculus entirely.

When you factor in getting to the airport (Paris’s main airports are 45 minutes to an hour from the center), arriving early for security, waiting, boarding, and then getting from the destination airport into the city — a two-hour flight can easily become a five-hour journey. Meanwhile, the train drops you directly in the city center.

Train stations in France are urban. You walk in, scan your ticket, board. There are no security lines (at least for domestic travel). No liquids restrictions. No removing your shoes.

Add to this the environmental argument — trains are far less carbon-intensive than planes — and the official French position is clear: take the train.

There’s even legislation now that bans certain short-haul domestic flights when a train alternative exists in under 2.5 hours.

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The TGV: France’s Pride

The TGV (Train à Grande Vitesse — literally “high-speed train”) is something France is genuinely proud of. It was one of the first high-speed rail networks in the world, launched in 1981, and for a long time it was faster than anything else in Europe.

Paris to Lyon in two hours. That’s 460 kilometers at around 300 km/h.

Stations are central, trains are generally comfortable, and the main routes are frequent enough that you rarely have to plan far in advance.

For international visitors, this is often one of the genuine pleasures of traveling in France — the elegance of arriving by train in a city center, stepping out directly into the place you actually want to be.

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The Problems (And There Are Many)

Here’s where it gets complicated.

Prices are unpredictable. The SNCF uses dynamic pricing — like airlines. Book early in a slow period and you can get Paris to Bordeaux for €20. Book at peak time (Christmas, August, any long weekend) and the same journey can cost €150 or more. Ironically, flying can sometimes be cheaper than taking the train, which undermines the whole ecological argument.

Strikes are frequent. France has a strong culture of industrial action, and the SNCF has some of the most active unions in the country. Rail strikes are a recurring feature of French life. And because the SNCF is a national company with a near-monopoly on rail, when it strikes, the entire country feels it.

The particularly French tension around strikes: most people support workers’ rights in principle. But when the CGT (the main rail union) calls a strike over Christmas week, the goodwill evaporates quickly. Suddenly everyone is stranded at their parents’ house or scrambling for rental cars. It’s one of those situations where you can be ideologically in favor of something and personally furious at it simultaneously.

The network is Paris-centric. This is perhaps the deepest structural problem. France’s entire train network was built with Paris at the center. All the major high-speed lines radiate outward from the capital like spokes on a wheel.

Which means: if you want to go from Lyon to Bordeaux — two major cities, roughly 500 km apart — you often have to go via Paris. Lyon to Paris (2h) + Paris to Bordeaux (2h) = 4 hours, plus transfers, for a journey that’s geographically much shorter.

For those of us in the southwest or other regions outside the main Paris corridors, this is a daily frustration. The network was built for centralized France, not for a country where people might actually want to travel between cities that aren’t the capital.

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My Personal SNCF Nightmare (A Typically French Story)

I have to share what happened to us recently, because it’s the perfect illustration of everything I’ve described.

My wife and I had tickets from the southwest (near Bayonne) to Paris — a four-hour journey we take a few times a year. We boarded normally, settled in, and the train set off. Two hours in, we pulled into Bordeaux.

And stopped.

The announcement crackled over the intercom: “We apologize for the inconvenience. We have a technical problem with one of the engines. We will remain stopped for a few minutes while we investigate.”

Fifteen minutes passed. Then thirty. Then the real news: the engine had a serious fault. They would need to replace part of the train. And because of regulations about night travel on high-speed lines, the repaired train would arrive in Paris at 5:30 in the morning instead of 11pm.

We were herded off the train and onto the platform at Bordeaux station. Three hundred passengers, nowhere to go, midnight approaching — and here’s the detail that made it particularly French: the train we’d been on was a low-cost SNCF service, which meant no power outlets. No one could charge their phones. The entire platform turned into a slow, anxious procession of people carrying cables, searching for any working socket in the station.

(Most of the sockets didn’t work.)

Eventually, they assembled a replacement train from different carriages. Our tickets said “Carriage 2, Seat 29.” When we boarded, Carriage 2 had no Seat 29. The conductor waved us toward any available seat.

As it turned out, the replacement carriage was first class. Which meant slightly wider seats and working power outlets. So we arrived at Paris’s Gare Montparnasse at 5:45am, vaguely rested, mildly victorious, having collectively complained with every other passenger for seven hours.

When I tell this story to French friends, every single one nods immediately. They all have a version. The SNCF delay is almost a rite of passage.

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France vs Japan: A Revealing Comparison

I lived in Japan for a year, and the contrast with French trains is striking.

Japanese trains run to the minute. Literally. If you have a one-minute connection between two Shinkansen (bullet trains), you can make it — because the trains leave and arrive precisely when scheduled. Missing a connection by seconds is considered a major failure of the system, and the railways publish formal apologies if a train is more than a few minutes late.

I tested this once without meaning to: we had a one-minute connection in Kobe, changing platforms. I was convinced we’d miss it. We didn’t. The first train pulled in, we stepped off, and the second train was already there, on the same platform, waiting for exactly this transfer. We walked twenty meters and boarded.

The cultural difference behind this matters: in Japan, the railway is seen as a civic institution with near-sacred reliability. Being a train driver carries professional pride. The entire system is built around punctuality as a value.

In France, the SNCF is seen more as a public service with a complicated union history, a political dimension, and inconsistent management. It’s not that French people don’t care about punctuality — it’s that the institutional structures pull in different directions.

Prices are another gap: in Japan, rail fares are fixed. What you see on the app is what you pay, regardless of when you book. There’s no dynamic pricing. In a country with frequent rail disasters (earthquakes, typhoons, floods), the infrastructure investment is enormous — yet the system remains affordable and reliable.

I don’t say this to criticize France. Every system reflects its context. But it’s a useful comparison for understanding why the SNCF inspires the particular mixture of affection and exasperation that it does.

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What This Means for French Learners

If you’re learning French and planning a trip to France, take the train at least once. It’s a genuinely French experience — the way people interact at stations, the vocabulary of announcements (prochain arrêt, correspondance, retard, voie), the particular kind of collective suffering when something goes wrong.

And if your train is delayed, you have a ready-made conversation starter with every French person around you. Start with: “C’est la SNCF…” — and watch people light up.

It’s one of those cultural touchstones that connects you to daily French life in a way that no textbook can replicate.

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This article is based on Episode 69 of the French with Félix podcast. Listen to the full episode →