The age of the train returns to French provinces

[John Ashworth]

The age of the train returns to French provinces

Locals win fight to reopen station as network extends to other rural areas
Lizzy Davies in Paris
The Guardian, Saturday August 23 2008

For almost 50 years, no train has stopped at the station of Bazancourt. A village in the Champagne region of France with just under 2,000 inhabitants, it was cut off from the railway network after the second world war and lay forgotten.

As France roared into a new era of high-speed train travel - or train à grande vitesse (TGV) as it is known in France - that linked up big cities, the provinces were left out in the cold.

Now, however, Bazancourt is back on track. Its dilapidated station has been given a lick of paint and restored to its former glory. The missing letters from its name have been fixed back on the freshly white-washed walls.

As of 1 September, twelve trains from the regional network will stop at its modernised platforms every day and the locals are claiming victory in what they have called the "battle of Bazancourt".

"We have been fighting for years for this and now at last it's happened," said Michel Jahyer, president of an association pushing for the reopening of smaller stations in the region around the city of Reims. "For 40 years the policy of the SNCF [public rail network] has been to focus almost entirely on the TGV. It was always the TGV. They have been totally uninterested in the rest of us."

Jahyer, for one, is delighted with what many are hailing as the revival of France's regional railways. He will now be able to travel to Reims in just 11 minutes, a distinct improvement on a half-hour car journey or winding bus tour which takes an hour to do the journey of 16 miles.

The village's teenagers will be able to come home from school on their own, the car-less elderly will be relieved of their isolation and commuters will be freed of the costs of parking and petrol.

But it is not just in Bazancourt that this is happening. All over France authorities are showing signs of waking up to the needs of the provinces after years in which high-speed, inter-city links have been the unquestioned priority.

From Provence to the outskirts of Paris, disused lines are being reactivated, small town stations reopened and new networks built.

At the same time, in a summer of soaring petrol prices and plummeting spending power, many French people are starting to make changes to the way they move around. Fuel consumption is down. For the first time in 30 years, car use is down as well.

Public transport is facing its highest demand in years - and one French news magazine asked this month whether these trends indicated a new era and "the end of the reign of the car". Régis van Herreweghe, a spokesman for the Mayor of Bazancourt, said the changes in his village had clear implications for the wider world.

"This mode of transport has obvious significance in terms of sustainable development in a global context of rising prices and fuel shortages," he said. "Travelling by rail helps people save money and protect the environment."

Speaking of the need to face up to the demands of a new, energy-efficient era, Guillaume Pépy, the president of the SNCF, said the main challenge of the coming years would be to provide a real alternative to the car. "This is an incredible chance for the railway, which many people 30 years ago thought had no future," he said. "Today, with the energy crisis, we're moving into a different period. Everyone realises that the car cannot be the only answer."

Michel Jahyer, meanwhile, is now lobbying the local Champagne-Ardenne authorities for a new railway station at the village of Chatelet-sur-Retourne, just eight miles down the road.

"There are still places without any public transport at all," he said. "No station, no bus, no nothing."

The battle of Bazancourt may have been won but the war, it seems, will roll on.