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if you want to see the change in rail networks over time across the world, check out https://openrailwaymap.app/
Well, I’d wager today’s rails are all electrified, and double-tracked, and mostly built for high-speed trains, while in the 1930’s you had single-tracked, curvy tracks mostly capable of connecting one village to the next. I’m no expert, but for short travels and low throughput, a bus is probably the better option than a train.
No, no and not really. You can check with carto.tchoo.net it shows electrification and max speeds.
It really is wild how many competing electrification systems exist in Europe. Even just in France there are multiple. Thanks for a cool site to obsess over.
You should try to overlay this with a map of the population density.
That is in all likelihood a product of urbanisation. As people move from the countryside into the cities it's no longer practical to operate the smaller stations.
on the other hand the population as a whole has skyrocketed though, and a big part of why people move into cities is because rural areas lose amenities like good public transport.
Yep a lot of the countryside outside of touristic hotspots are kinda dead in France. You can see that they used to support a much more vibrant community but now it's just shut down stores and closed shutters with the occasional remaining locals or implants that were looking for cheap properties. And as others have said replacement by bus lines that are better suited to the low usage.
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beeching_cuts in the UK, which by their very nature disproportionately affected rural and marginalised communities that had little other public transportation.
Its not so bad. A lot of the lower density route just got replaced by bus. And bus are fine in my experience, and that was in bumbfuck nowhere where train made little sense anyway.
Well, I'd prefer to have trains rather than buses. Trains are more efficient (once built) and ecological than buses, and they go faster and aren't affected by traffic.
where train made little sense anyway.
Why did it make little sense? It was built in a time where there was demand. Then it was removed because people did not use it as much anymore, but I doubt it was because of buses, it was mostly cars.
is there a map with the served stations because in some cases it looks like you still can go to the same place but you have connections instead of direct lines ? But still kind of sad, not getting better currently, mostly because of the costs, a plane can be way cheaper than train... I don't understand why they don't increase taxes of aeroplane transports
Because the ones who decide the taxes travel exclusively by plane.
it's not like they are paying for it, but I guess they get paid to be this way
Due to trains getting faster or the gov cutting them?
Cutting them. The govt has nearly only focused on high speed inter city trains. Some regional commuter ones.
All the trains that served rural people have pretty much died and been replaced by the car.
Dut to individual cars becoming the norm
Probably also due to new bus lines replacing smaller train lines and/or driving passengers to/from the remaining bigger train stations of the lines instead. I guess bus service had lower maintenance and operational costs while being more flexible than a small train or tram.
Do you have actual numbers that support that for the French bus service replacing their rail? As when that was mooted when Beeching did the same rail cuts to the UK railway lines, the buses for small and unpopular branch lines lasted a year or so before they were also cancelled or massively scaled back
No, no numbers, but I have heard and read that that's the history of the smaller railways in other European countries around that time.
For some reason the post doesn't load for me, here is a direct linek to the reddit post via a redlib frontend: https://eu.safereddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/1msm7ub/the_french_railway_network_has_shrunk_over_the/
this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2025
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