Where can I find the exact itinerary of a French train?

Question

I took a French train (TGV).

Does there exist a map that shows the exact itinerary? I mean an exact geographical itinerary (so drawn on top of a map/photo), not a list of the stops.

(Related to Where can I find out where trains are at the moment, with a map or otherwise? but I'm in the offline case.)

Answer 1

As far as I know, there's no such public resource which actually gets it right all the time.

Most tools which attempt to do this will try to guess it from the stops and the shortest distances, but they do sometimes get it wrong. Even very detailed sites like https://carto.tchoo.net don't always know (as far as I know it only shows currently running trains anyway, so not suitable for your use case anyway, unless you check it at the same time your train was running, but on a different date).

Other sites (search for the same itinerary on a different date) include:

• Google Maps
• The CFF/SBB website

Note that:

• Trains do not necessarily take the geographically shortest itinerary. The best illustration is TGVs to/from Paris Gare de Lyon, which use the geographically longer Ligne de Villeneuve-Saint-Georges à la bifurcation de Moisenay (LGV) because it's actually faster, since it's a high-speed line.
• Some trains on apparently very similar itineraries may take very different routes. Trains between Chambéry and Paris may for instance either go via Aix-les-Bains and Bourg-en-Bresse or via La Tour-du-Pin.
• Trains from Toulouse to Paris may go via Bordeaux (TGVs) or the terrible POLT line (classic trains and night trains, I believe). They get to different stations in Paris though.
• Trains between Paris and Bordeaux (and beyond) may either stay on the high-speed line all along or switch back and forth between the high-speed and classic lines to serve intermediate stations like Poitiers or Angoulême.
• In case of disruption, trains can be re-routed via quite different paths. The most common case is re-routing of TGVs onto the "classic line" when there's a problem on the high-speed line. There are a few other alternative routings here and there (not that many, though), like the bypass via the Grande Ceinture Stratégique, or sending a train to a different station in Paris (via the Interconnexion Est).

If you want a detailed map of the tracks (not the actual or even imagined train itineraries):

• https://openrailwaymap.org
• https://carto.tchoo.net/ again
• The official Atlas du réseau ferré français (available as a PDF if you want to read it offline).

If you tell us which train you took (and the date) there's a good chance someone would be able to tell you the route it took.

Answer 2

My preferred resource for this kind of train trivia is signal.eu.org. You can look up your train number of a station name in the search field. This site will give you for a few western Europe network (and apparently for the US ?), but especially for France, among other things:

• Schedule for any given station, e.g for Toulouse Matabiau
• The outline of a given train service itineraries, including the stops and the expected speed, here for a Paris-Nice TGV
• You can click on "Carte" to get the exact itinerary (at least the scheduled one ?)
• A Trainspotter mode (A list of the scheduled trains passing near a geographic point)

A few caveat : the site is in french only. The data are a mix of published schedules and near real time info, but there are some quality issues (lot of duplicates, missing services in the "station" pages, ...). I don't know how exact the mapped itineraries are, but they look good to me.

EDIT I tried to check @jcaron note about Paris-Chambéry. This site show the 6443 14:48 from Paris) and the 6447 (15:46 From Paris) with the same itinerary via La Tour-du-Pin, but as the former take 2h52m and the latter 3h44m, I now think there are some issues there ... At least the second service looks much cheaper.

Answer 3

A useful resource that has not yet been mentioned is Ferrocarta: https://ferrocarta.net/france/france_en.html . It purports to show (among other things) the exact geographical itineraries of all the regular train services in France.

There are however some drawbacks. First, it is sometimes not quite up-to-date (and sometimes actually not accurate at all).

Second, the color scheme does not always allow you to tell exactly which trains have which destination. E.g. all high-speed trains (even those that are not run by SNCF, like Eurostar!) are lumped together in the same color (orange), so the only information you actually get is how many TGV trainsets traverse any given piece of track per day. In "easy" cases, you can then figure things out with some educated guesses. In harder cases (like the Chambéry conundrum mentioned by @jcaron ), Ferrocarta isn't really helpful.