I challenged myself to visit (nearly) all 2,900 of France's regional train stations

Yves Robert has one more accomplishment under his belt. The 77-year-old new retiree, fixated on challenges, has spent five years stopping at (almost) every one of France’s 2,900 train stations.

He started on June 4, 2019 at Orgerus’ train station, in Yvelines where he lives, he finished on May 14, 2024 at Versailles Rive Droite train station, welcomed to the sounds of cheers and victory by family members.

It took him five years to complete through regular trips in his spare time, having hopped on 470 trains, spent 140 complete days on them and €5,000 on tickets.

It adds to a myriad other challenges he has completed over 60 years. He cycled from Bois-d’Arcy (Yvelines) to Notre-Dame-de-Monts (Vendée) in 1963, hitch-hiked from Paris to Jerusalem in 1968, walked from Orgerus to Palavas-les-Flots (Hérault) in 17 days in 1995, reached Hong Kong by train in three weeks with his wife in 2008, cycled along France’s coasts in 2012 and reached Notre-Dame-de-Monts from Orgerus by kayaking.

“France is the most beautiful country in the world. French people are the only ones unaware of it,” he told The Connexion, who talked with the intrepid traveller about what aspects of France he discovers while riding the local TER and other ‘omnibus’ trains (local trains which stop at every station).

It has been four months now since you completed your challenge. What feelings have prevailed over these months?

I felt relief, joy and sadness. I was happy that it stopped because the past 14 days had been non-stop travelling, train-hopping 150km per day. It was tiresome. I was met by family members upon arrival. The sadness came afterwards, once I understood it was over. 

Now I’m editing all the notes I wrote in a journal during the trip – I am still travelling in my head.

Have you travelled 29,000 or 32,000km? You sent some documentation stating 29,000 kilometres, but one article in Le Parisien mentioned 32,000. 

(Laughs) It is because Le Parisien counts the TGV lines, some that I have taken myself as an absolute last necessity. I rode – almost all of – the lines of the ‘omnibus’ and regional TER trains. It is a completely different trip that takes much much longer. 

It took me four different trains to go from Saint-Quentin (Aisne) to Paris (Ile-de-France), another six from Nantes (Loire-Atlantique) to Paris because one train stopped in Ancenis, the next one in Angers (Maine) etc. Dijon-Paris required another three different trains.

How fast does an ‘omnibus’ go? 

Ahhhhhhhh – the million dollar question! There is a bit of everything behind the ‘omnibus’ and the TERs. 

The lines from Bordeaux (Gironde) to Bayonne (Pyrénées-Atlantique) or Mont-de-Marsan (Landes) are the fastest and run up to 160km an hour because the Landes territory is an open land. I rode a Nantes-La Rochelle with very degraded lines at 40km an hour. Le Cévenol, a longline train, runs at near walking speed in the Massif Central. 

The first train that connected Paris to Nantes was built in 1851 and went at 50km an hour. It took around 14 hours, whereas the stagecoach would take six days. It was a revolution comparable to the introduction of the telephone or the internet. The amount of stations is what struck me most during this trip. There was this desire to move and see other regions.

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American historian Daniel J. Boorstin says the United States is a nation of people constantly moving forward. Would you say the same thing about us in France?

Not really. You know, when my father- in-law left his native Brittany in 1947 to work in Paris, he was accompanied by his father at Questembert (Morbihan) train station and they were all crying. We do not share the same relationship with trains. The unity of the American nation was reached with the help of trains. 

It is not the main transportation system because Americans are born out of pragmatism and switched to cars once it became the dominant industry. Yet 30% of the freight is carried by train compared with 10% in France.

Is France different when enjoyed at 50, 80 or 160km per hour?

Yes. Let’s just say that riding the TER gives you a clearer picture of France than the TGV. I have spent a lot of my time glancing at the landscape but it is also about the people that hop on and off. You get none of this when you ride the TGV from Paris to Bayonne, where all the passengers seem to speak the language of Paris. There are four trains heading to Paris every day from Hendaye.

What does France look like in a TER?

Diverse. Mainly, the people who ride the TER are the French daily workers, those who cannot afford a car. It is the France of regional accents and British expats such as at the Le-Buisson train station in Dordogne. 

I stayed there a couple of hours, awaiting a train, and I was shocked at how many British citizens there were. They represented half of the people at the train station.

Did you miss some lines?

The Mulhouse-Delle (Territoire de Belfort) near the Swiss border because I did not know it at the time. The Plouaret and Lannion (in Côtes-d’Armor), another one between Aubusson and Guéret (in Creuse) and one between Joeuf (Meurthe-et-Moselle) and Metz (in Moselle).

There must have been some train stations that I missed because I thought that the train would have stopped there [but it did not]. There is around one train station per 10km on average. 

There are some where nobody hops either on or off, mainly in the Massif Central, because it is somewhat complicated and cumbersome to build the infrastructure there.

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I ride the TER train from Ventimiglia to Monaco everyday. It is a technological beauty that pierces the mountains with who knows how many tunnels...

I took it. People take it to commute like commuters from Paris and its suburbs would with the RERs. Only the landscape is not the same. 

You ride through Mandelieu-la-Napoule and Villefranche-sur-Mer [Alpes-Maritimes]. I mean, it is quite the trip but people are mostly stuck with their head in their phones.

I call it ‘the best commute in the world.’

I do not know about that. The most beautiful line is not that far away actually, the line from Nice to Tende (Alpes-Maritimes). 

I took it once when researching an article about the Saint-Dalmas-de-Tende train station.

Ah! The Mussolini train station! An incredible political decision like Metz’s train station, inspired by Gothic and German architecture and built by Wilhelm II after he took Alsace and Lorraine territory in 1870. 

Trains in Alsace ride on the right, by the way. As soon as you leave Lorraine, they ‘leapfrog’ and switch lines. One goes down under the ground over a bridge above the other one.

Reflecting on all of your trips, why did you decide to do them?

I do not know. I like challenges. But there needs to be a travelling component in it, going from point A to point B, wherever it is. The places I go, by the way, are most of the time sort of ‘anti-touristic’. But you always learn interesting things.

Once I walked along the A9 highway for one challenge that took me from Orgerus (Yvelines) to Palavas-les-Flots (Herault) and walked across two villages that claimed to be at the most central point of France. One included Corsica in the calculation, the other did not.

What is your next challenge then?

Something to do with editing my text; maybe to find an editor. We will see...

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