Great Western Coffee Shop

I wonder if this would interest anyone, if only the few who know their way around the EAS.

SNCF Infra have taken to putting a lot of effort into explaining their plans to the public, and running consultations. Here, as an example, is the website for work at Bordeaux St Jean (http://www.garebordeauxsaintjean2017.fr/).

But the same approach is also applied to information about possessions, which looks really odd. I mean, it's not as if that many of the public want to know when they can go and work on a railway.

This is how it seems to work, for the region Centre-Val de la Loire. The first part of the Calendrier des interceptions et chantiers en 2017 (http://www.sncf-reseau.fr/sites/default/files/upload/CALENDRIER_CVL_2017_-_TYPOLOGIES.pdf) shows each short stretch of the network and the times per day when it can be closed for works. There are sets of maps for the first and second half of the year, and for short possessions only and more generally. Daily access windows are indicated per track (usually V1 and V2) and by the trains before and after the window.

Those trains are defined by source and destination and their number, and you can look those up in public timetables. However, having picked one and done that I find that there are red dots to show trains liable to bustitution, and they spread well outside the windows given in the calendrier. Of course the timetables now on-line are almost finished, and I wonder if train numbers are bound to be the same in a year's time.

The second half of the calendrier (http://www.sncf-reseau.fr/sites/default/files/upload/CALENDRIER_CVL_2017_-_CARTES_S50-S17.pdf) shows the planned possessions week by week until week 17. It doesn't give exact times, but presumably they should come from the other maps. However, that still looks less than the full story, i.e. what the EAS contains.

I don't think you need to read the words to see the general idea - it's not as if anyone really needs to extract the details from it. But I hope you can see what I mean about it being very prettified for no obvious reason.

That's an interesting presentation of the data and when lines will / might (?) be closed for works. Am I right in thinking that some are daytime closures during the week for up to six hours?   Looks like a somewhat different approach to the UK ... I wonder how the passenger base here would feel about (say) a 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. closure of Weston-super-mare to Taunton every Friday?

Yes, it does. I think that would mostly apply to minor lines, but I haven't checked.

However, you need to remember that a lot of these smaller TER routes only have trains on the heavily-used services, and the rest are buses anyway.