Think of France and your mind naturally wanders to the fabulous cityscapes of Paris, to the
sidewalk cafes and the shopping in elegant department stores where French apparel, perfume
and shoes have a seemingly unassailable lead in the international marketplace.
But since the days of Charles de Gaulle, France has also been gradually gaining ground in
the areas of advanced technology.
But it was in 1981 that France pulled off one of its most successful coups by demonstrating
that contrary to popular belief, you could fly faster by rail.
The launching of the train Grand Vitesse, or TGV, signalled the triumphant resurgence of
the railways as the mode of transport best suited to present day European living.
The TGV was the beginning of a French driven transportation revolution, designed to surmount
the problems of Europe's grossly over saturated roads and skies.
The concept will culminate in the development of a high speed network which eventually may
link 14 countries and 336 million people.
How about this for a schedule?
Breakfast in London followed by lunch in a nice little restaurant here in Paris and then
dinner in Barcelona.
Sounds like a fairly brain numbing type of timetable, but 10 years from now business
people will hardly give it a second thought.
Riding aboard the second generation TGV, known as the Atlantique, will be no hardship at
all unless you have an aversion to speed.
It flashes along a standard continuously welded track at 300 kilometres an hour, negotiating
soft 4 kilometre radius turns with hardly a jolt.
And while the early TGV poached 60% of air passengers on the Paris-Lyon leg, the Atlantique
is expected to do the same on the run to Bordeaux and the Brittany coast.
The Atlantique system has been meticulously designed to cater for every caprice of the
demanding French business traveller.
Reservations take all of five minutes, spent sitting at your own desk using a Minitel personal
computer.
And in true French style, the travellers offer a veritable banquet of choices, not only what
train and what class, but what direction you'd like to sit in, whether you want to watch
the view coming or going.
As a business passenger travelling first class, for example, you're entitled to all the creature
comforts, like being served this appetising breakfast.
The seating formations are designed to provide private meeting or working areas, and there's
also a telephone booth on the train.
To travel at 300 kilometres an hour in almost total comfort with breakfast, what more could
one ask for?
Travelling by plane, you are often faced with delays, and on top of that, there was often
fog at Nantes airport, and at those times, the plane's never left at all.
This is pretty exciting stuff.
We're travelling across the landscape faster than most twin-engineer aircraft, and it's
very quiet and very comfortable in these cabins.
And it doesn't take long to work out what a profound influence these fast trains are
going to have.
They'll help quadruple the amount of rail traffic, they'll shrink the travel times between major
European capitals, sometimes by hours, and of course, they'll have quite a dramatic effect
on the profitability of many of the medium to short-haul air transport links.
The European High Speed Rail Network is a massive and extremely ambitious project, which
will stretch over the next 30 years.
It will involve the 12 EEC countries, Switzerland and Austria, 19,000 miles or 30,000 kilometres
of special track, and an expenditure of around $100 billion.
The first stage of the project sees the completion of existing national lines finalised by 1995.
The second stage brings cities like Athens and Valencia and Spain into the network by
2005.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.