French trains: faster, cheaper, greener, sexier

Guillaume Pepy doesn’t look like a man in a hurry. An elegant 47-year-old Frenchman with impeccable manners, he doesn’t look like an archetypal railwayman either, which may be because he isn’t. It’s true that he’s an énarque, a graduate of France’s elite Ecole Nationale d’Administration, but he’s also been both a judge and a market-research expert with Taylor Nelson Sofres in France and America, which hardly sounds like suitable qualifications to run La Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer. Yet as chief executive of SNCF, which runs France’s pride and joy, Les Trains à Grande Vitesse, he can claim to be Europe’s most powerful and successful rail boss. Oh, and he’s also chairman of Eurostar, which runs the trains under the Channel.

This week he’s been in a terrible hurry. Somewhere along the TGV line between Lorraine and Champagne, one of his trains has been trying to cover a 10km stretch of line at a speed of 560kph.