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Bonjour everyone and welcome to another episode of Half as Interesting, the show that’s
like if CGP Grey and a bad stand-up comedian had a kid who read too many Wikipedia articles.
My name is Sam, and I’m going to talk about French trains in just a moment, but we’re
beginning with a note from my writer Adam, because he knows I’ll just read whatever
is put in front of me: “Hello audience, this is Adam, Sam’s very
funny and extremely good looking writer.
I’m here to let you know that Sam speaks French, and so in this video I have given
him as many French words to say as possible because Sam gets stressed out about pronouncing
them perfectly, and I find that funny, or as the French might say, amusante.
Au revoir, now mes amis.”
Alright monsiers et mademoiselles, now that that’s fini, let’s get started.
The good news is, even if you don’t know French, this should be easy to follow because
a lot of words sound the same in English and French.
They call trains les trains, they call rails le rails, and they call what happened to their
trains and rails in 2014 stupide.
See, it’s all very easy to comprendre.
Our story begins in 2009, when les trains and les rails were getting a bit run down,
and so, faster than you could say un, deux, trois, the French government decided to spend
$20 billion dollars, or dix-huit milliards d’euros, to get a new fleet of sleeker,
faster, roomier trains.
Fantastique, you might think, but in fact, things were far from fantastique.
You see, the French rail operator, Réseau Ferré de France, is a separate operation
from the train company, which is called Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer.
Now normally, I would abbreviate Réseau Ferré de France as RFF and Société Nationale des
Chemins de Fer as SNCF, but instead I’m going to say their full names each time because
Adam thinks that’s funny, I guess.
Back in 1997, the rail operator, whose name, again, is Réseau Ferré de France and the
train company—again, Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer—were all one company,
which was also called Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer.
But in 1997, a new EU directive meant that the government had to split them up into two
different government-run entities—one for les rails and one for les trains—and it
was that separation that created the opportunity for miscommunication.
But still, things should have been easy—it wasn’t like they had to play La Vie En Rose
on a croissant; all the rail company, Réseau Ferré de France, needed to do was tell the
train company, Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer, how wide to make the trains.
The problem was, they took all their measurements from train platforms built within the last
30 years, forgetting that the older platforms in rural areas were built to a different standard,
and ran about 8 inches, or vingt centimètres narrower than the newer ones.
They then gave those flawed measurements to the train company, Société Nationale des
Chemins de Fer.
Fast forward a few years and voila, 2,000 new trains had been completed, and the trains
were beautiful—sleek, fast, roomy; everything looked like it would be magnifique—but that’s
when they discovered that getting the new trains into the older stations was like trying
to stuff a baguette into a bottle of sauvignon blanc… they just wouldn’t fit.
To be clear, this wasn’t just a little mistake, it was a full-blown catastrophe.
1,300 of the 8,700 stations in France—about one in seven—were too narrow for the new
trains to fit into.
At first the government tried to keep their mistake a secret—but soon, the news was
broken by the magazine Le Canard Enchainé, prompting cries of, “sacrebleu,” from
the train makers, and cries of, “why is our government dumber than a bucket of escargot,”
from all the French people.
Seeing as, “fitting into stations,” is one of the more important qualifications a
train needs to check, alongside, “fitting on train tracks,” and, “not being an airplane,”
the French government quickly got to work fixing the problem by shaving off the edges
of the older, narrower platforms.
It wasn’t a particularly difficult fix, just an expensive one.
According to the Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer, these repairs cost the French about
$68.4 million dollars, or soixante millions d'euros.
For context, that’s enough money to buy 7.1 million copies of Les Miserables on DVD,
or buy 2.5 million plates of foie gras de canard mi-cuit at Au Pied de Cochon in Paris.
But, if you’re heading on vacation soon to Paris or Bordeaux or even Montpellier,
don’t worry: the platforms have been fixed and everything runs as smooth as a bowl of
mousse au chocolate, and this French faux pas feels as distant as déjà vu.
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