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. That’s 350mph in real money, or more than half the cruising speed of a commercial airliner. True, it’s downhill all the way, with champagne at the end, but since the existing world record was 320mph, it was bound to cause a stir.
Pepy’s eyes light up at the thought. The TGV, he says, is not merely a means to go from A to B at high speed; it’s a destination in itself. Instead of a night on the town, try a day on the train. Before you decide this is daft, or an ultimate expression of the belief that it’s better to travel hopefully than to arrive, consider what he’s done. SNCF is profitable, and not merely in the way that British train-operating companies are because they’re paid to run a franchise, or the way that Network Rail can claim a sort of profit-before-subsidies, but in actually earning a commercial return.
Comments
Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just $5 for 3 monthsAlready a subscriber? Log in