In this book, leading member of the Railway Performance Society Alan Varley discusses and analyzes a lifetime of railway travel across the French Railways (SNCF) network - over a million kilometers worth The performance of different types of train is assessed on the wide variety of routes on which they operated, giving the opportunity to see the impact of modernization, first from steam to diesel, and latterly to the dedicated high speed lines of the Trains a Grande Vitesse (TGV).