8am on the slow train to Paris

It’s just past 8am. I’ve been on the slow train to Paris Bercy from rural Bourgogne for an hour an a half. The sun has just about burnt off the fog of the morning along the Yonne and now the Seine. We are rumbling along the line somewhere between Montereau and Melun.

An elderly gentleman opposite, his hair still slick from his morning shower, boarded in Joigny, and pokes determinedly at his laptop. A young mother rocks her young baby to sleep standing by the toilets. A chap with a grey beard and a furrowed brow, his head in his hand, watches something on his mobile. A few passengers cannot get seats and stand hunched in the door vestibule.

But why am I here anyway?

There is a quicker way to Paris – via Montbard onto the TGV, saving an hour. But that is €70 single, and this, the regional train is €26 (I have a reduction card, it’s €38 otherwise). And my client, a public institution that schools the future French political elite, won’t pay for the expensive one. Both trains are operated by the state-owned SNCF of course.

I thankfully do not do this trip every day – from Ravières (2 hours 15 minutes) it’s too far. But most of the passengers board in Joigny or Sens, 75 mins and 60 mins respectively from Paris, making this grinding trip every morning and every evening, to work in Paris and back, driven to the outer reaches of Paris’s commuter belt because that is the only way to make ends meet. Beyond Joigny it is more precarious still.

The people in this train ought to have a better service, something more pleasant than a creaking, cranking regional multiple unit that anyway has a capacity that’s too low, and has no wifi and lousy mobile reception along the route, making it hard to work on board. And trains more regular that the current hourly service with gaps in the timetable. But as Sens is in Bourgogne-Franche-Comté and they’re commuting to Île de France these people are the lowest of the low of anyone’s priorities.

Meanwhile our political leaders choose to fly from Bruxelles to Luxembourg, a decision both absurd and somehow understandable, given that – like here – the train on that route is not a pleasant experience on board, has no wifi or on-board catering, and is too slow. If the likes of von der Leyen or Metsola did see how the rest of us travel, perhaps Europe’s railway networks would get the investment they urgently require.

Meanwhile the fields and rivers outside the window have been replaced by the endless expanse of concrete of the southern suburbs of Paris, punctuated by the rusty sidings and marshaling yards testimony to grandeur of French rail of the past. I’ll be at the concrete hulk of Bercy station shortly, the cracked concrete of a parking lot glowering over tracks in need of repair.

We, the commuters on the slow train to Paris, will all go our separate ways into the city, to be re-united in the grind on the way home again this evening.

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