Trains are an important form of transportation in France. The SNCF, France's national train service, had nearly 163 million passengers in 2024 (for comparison, in 2024 the United States's national railway company, Amtrak, had around 32.8 million passengers). The fastest trains, know as the trains à grande vitesse (high speed trains) or TGVs for short, were introduced in France in 1981 via a collaboration between the SNCF and Alstom, a French multinational train manufacturer. Today's TGV trains regularly reach speeds of 320+ kilometers/hour (200 miles/hour), but the fastest a French TGV train has gone is nearly 575 kilometers/hour (357 miles/hour)! There are several daily TGV trains connecting Rennes and Paris directly, a voyage of around 90 minutes.
Although travel by car is the most popular form of transportation in France as in the United States, train travel is still very important, especially in the Île-de-France area servicing Paris and the surrounding cities. Each day, around four million passengers move around the Paris region via the RATP (Régie autonome des transports parisiens), the company which manages the metro lines in Paris, and nearly half a million travel via TGV. The ridership numbers on the RATP within Paris is comparable to New York City.
