“Electronic journey planner information with point-to-point connections from a worm’s-eye view can never replace the warming overview of a timetable table.”
Wrzlbrnft, January 2022
It was the mid-90s, somewhere in the Zurich area. I had only discovered the hobby of travelling and collecting tracks a few years earlier, which had also awakened my interest in timetables, when the Zurich Transport Association (Zürcher Verkehrsverbund / ZVV) announced that its network timetable would be discontinued. There would be other ways of providing timetable information using modern electronic means (= journey planner on CD-ROM) they said. The example of ZVV was to be followed by almost all public transport operators in the world, even though “journey planners on CD-ROM” were soon replaced by internet-based online systems. Timetable books and schedule tables still exist today, but they have since become a niche tool for railway enthusiasts and timetable geeks. In some places, however, there are no longer any timetable tables that reflect the entire granularity of services on certain routes or in certain areas. This is the case in France, where the last TGV long-distance timetables were published in the mid-2010s. So I’d like close this gap. It took 2 years of preparatory work, sometimes with more, sometimes with fewer breaks in between, but in January 2022 the first edition was published and the “LGV Timetable France” was born!
I would like to give like-minded people who – like me – are track collectors and interested in timetables, service and operating philosophies and railways in general, the opportunity to get a complete overview of traffic on France’s high-speed lines again. It was undoubtedly a great deal of work. So I am pleased being now able to share this major project with you.
It will remain a challenge to keep this work up to date in the future. The experience of the last two years has shown me that a good week of time is needed each time to verify and update the timetable data, to adapt footnotes with traffic periods, to find and integrate new offers, etc.. As an advocate of the open data philosophy, I want to keep the LGV Timetable freely accessible to all interested parties.
Enjoy your reading and always have a “Bon voyage !” (as well as “Gute Fahrt!”)
Wrzlbrnft