Train à Grande Vitesse
Please note that some or all of the objects mentioned in this post are no longer visible on Google Earth or Google Maps.
This is a Train à Grande Vitesse or TGV (literally meaning ‘high-speed train’), presumably travelling from Marseille to Paris. 17 years younger than Japan’s Shinkansen bullet train system, the more modern TGV has travelled faster than any other commercially-operating conventional train - under test conditions it has achieved 320.2 miles per hour.
Instead of line-side signals the TGV uses TVM (Transmission Voie-Machine), where information is transmitted to the trains via electrical pulses through the rails (giving signals directly through the train dashboard), as the trains travel far too fast to be sure of seeing signs whizzing past them.
Thanks to Guillaume for this one.
Wikipedia has a good page on the TGV here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TGV
Whoa, they just changed the interface of Google Maps. Or at least I just noticed. Very cool. Vancouver has a crappy transportation system and I don’t even want to guess at how bad the trains are.
In fact, this train is travelling from Paris (or Lyon) to Marseille as the TGV always travel on the left side.
Nice one! I’ve been looking for a TGV for a long time with no success. Congrats!
My favorite version still remains the yellow one from La Poste (french postal service) in which mails is sorted during the travel at 270km/h!
http://www.railfaneurope.net/pix/fr/electric/emu/TGV/Poste/pix.html
Look to the south west - past the great station ( the French shame us Brits with their railways) Does anyone know what this is?
Placemark: Google Maps / Google Earth
Boy, talk about great train stations. I followed the TGV line north and found this one at a major airport:
Placemark: Google Maps / Google Earth
That’s Lyon St Exupery airport. The TGV station was designed by Santiago Calatrava (of Athens Olympic Stadium fame). Thanks for finding it, I never thought of checking if it was available in hi-res!
Here are photos taken outside and inside:
http://jonathan.rawle.org/gallery/esrf/station
http://jonathan.rawle.org/gallery/esrf/station_in
Satellite, Placemark: This / Google Earth looks like a test track or a race track.
Jack
I thought that at first but i think it is full of water. If we knew the town nearby we might be able to track it down.
I am almost sure we’re talking about grass ans not water.
I’m sure this is an artifical lake. You can find a canal to the north connecting to lake.
Placemark: Google Maps / Google Earth
You should probably just go ahead and nuke the Google Earth links. They still contain no coordinate information
Zoltan, it’s the “Réservoir de Réaltor”, and the canal is used to bring the water to Marseille (the canal just go underground at the bottom of this loop : Placemark: Google Maps / Google Earth).
http://www.web-provence.com/fr/realtor.htm
tt, the GEarth link for this post works now. For the moment I’m just deleting broken ones as I find them until we can work out what’s going on and fix it properly.
Seems like a strange shape for a storage reservoir.
hmichelon, zoltan ; the “reservoir du Realtor” is the lake north to the oval shape. I really do not know what the ovale shape is. I work not far from there. I’ll try to go and have a look at it next week…. Keep posted.
I would say this is an hippodrome (or horse track training). A straight line for fences and circle for normal races…
south of the train station the train goes underground. Can anyone find where it pops back out?
I live in Avignon where there are a beautifull archistructural TGV station:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Avignon_tgv_station.jpg
On google Maps, we can’t zoom on it.
I often take the Lyon Marseille Line, TGV go up to 320km/h on this line (200 mph). Into it, you don’t feel the speed because train is very stable, soundproofed and all its movement are very smooth (acceleration, deceleration, curve). It’s plaisant to see outside because you see beautifull landscape on this line and it change fastly.
There is a lot of TGV (and so people using it) on this line, so a lot of parisian tourist come in the south of France just for the week end because it take only 3h to do Paris-Marseille (it was impossible before, 8-9h of road).
TGV can use normal line everywhere in France (Europe?), but on classic railway, it go half speed (about 150km/h I think).
A last thing: rail-wheel are not under wagon but between wagon.
Andrew, Placemark: Here / Google Earth is where the train pops out. It wasn’t so easy to find
Uhuh, spam going on there ? :O
Hey I thought about looking for a TGV article.
(oops, wrong button)
Hey I thought about looking for a TGV article after the last article about the Maglev Test Track as it is still the fastest wheeled train.
Note that on 3 April 2007, a test TGV reached 574.8 km/h (357 mph) which is almost 40 mph more than featured in this article back in 2005 !