inOui ... keskseksa ?

[whole diary]

[TonyK]

Far from ennui, then.

[stuving]

Far from ennui, then.

There is actually an existing French word inoui - or rather inouï (and for the avoidance of doubt and bad fairies that's a trema on the final i). It means unprecedented, amazing, unbelievable. I'm not sure whether that reading was intended by whoever dreamt up the name - oddly, I saw no French comments that mentioned it (and while it's a little literary, it's not obscure or archaic).

[stuving]

2. I found a piece about replacing a level crossing (No 20 at La Valbonne) with an underbridge, with a price of 7M euros. That strikes me as low, even allowing for the fact it's in the middle of nowhere and only appears to use railway land. The plan is to dig the road cutting, and build a bridge and put in some piles, then close the line to quickly dig through the track and drag the bridge into place. The site is pretty much level, so there's no natural grade separation.

A coda to that item, which also may be a bit unfamiliar. This road-under-rail replacement crossing has now been opened. Having been costed at 7M euros, it was built for only 6M. The land was in fact owned by the local council and the MoD, but still presumably not part of the published cost.

[TonyK]

A coda to that item, which also may be a bit unfamiliar. This road-under-rail replacement crossing has now been opened. Having been costed at 7M euros, it was built for only 6M. The land was in fact owned by the local council and the MoD, but still presumably not part of the published cost.

If they do foreigners, could they come to Portishead please?

[stuving]

If you're interested, there's a brochure with pictures of old and new La Valbonne crossings, here.

[Bmblbzzz]

A coda to that item, which also may be a bit unfamiliar. This road-under-rail replacement crossing has now been opened. Having been costed at 7M euros, it was built for only 6M. The land was in fact owned by the local council and the MoD, but still presumably not part of the published cost.

If they do foreigners, could they come to Portishead please?

The brochure mentions two new roads as well, so perhaps there was some sharing of costs? And of course lower land prices eventually reflect into other costs...

Also, I like the way the brochure casually mentions "the weekend of Ascension".  Presumably they didn't do the work on Ascension Day itself because in France, l'armée orange gets public holidays off too?

[stuving]

A coda to that item, which also may be a bit unfamiliar. This road-under-rail replacement crossing has now been opened. Having been costed at 7M euros, it was built for only 6M. The land was in fact owned by the local council and the MoD, but still presumably not part of the published cost.

If they do foreigners, could they come to Portishead please?

The brochure mentions two new roads as well, so perhaps there was some sharing of costs? And of course lower land prices eventually reflect into other costs...

Also, I like the way the brochure casually mentions "the weekend of Ascension".  Presumably they didn't do the work on Ascension Day itself because in France, l'armée orange gets public holidays off too?

The road past the station on each side of the line was included in a programme of work to upgrade the station itself, so that isn't part of this project. The new road under the bridge, from ground level down, round, and up, is built on the far side of the station so those other roads are part of the route. But that's the only common part.

Ascension is the one holiday in May that's fixed on a Thursday; while there are many others the number that fall on working days varies from year to year. The French way is to join such a holiday (or one on Tuesday) to the nearby weekend, which compensates on average for the two years in seven where the holiday falls on the weekend and is lost. So that was a four-day long weekend for schools, offices, and most workers (with big obvious exceptions). An ideal time to close a railway so as to drag a bridge into place. Most railway works that can be done in under a week are done over long weekends if possible, as here (though the French have longer ones).

In addition to this kind of upgrade work, there is a huge amount of renewals work going on at the moment. That too is mostly done in concentrated bursts of round-the-clock working, much of it by contractors, in part to make up numbers. SNCF^▸ (Societe Nationale des Chemins de fer Francais - French National Railways) has reacted to the accident at Brétigny-sur-Orge in 2013 very much as Railtrack/NR^» (Network Rail - home page) did to Hatfield.

[Bmblbzzz]

I remember one year when I was working in Poland, 1st May (Labour Day) and 3rd May (Constitution Day) fell on Tuesday and Thursday; hey presto, a whole week off! 

I don't replace Ascension Day being a holiday there, but there's Corpus Christi a couple of weeks later and Assumption Day (15th August) to make up for it.

[stuving]

I know it's not exactly topical, but I just came across this English-language piece about the choice of the name InOui. It seems that most of the (serious) comments here were right, and in this case including the similarity to inouï. That wasn't mentioned by the guy who came up with it, who was interviewed. It's from The Connexion

Was the TGV rebrand as ‘inOui’ your idea?

It was the customers’ idea – because we did market research with focus groups of customers – once we explained to them what the service was about. It’s still a TGV, it’s called TGV inOui, but the idea is to simplify the offer to the customers. So firstly there’s the low-cost service with Ouigo, which represents 5% of the high-speed offer at the moment, and will represent 25% by 2020. Alongside this we wanted to have a premium-but-affordable service, which corresponds to criteria including wifi on board, new trains and liveries, or fully renovated and upgraded ones, and a better service on board with staff trained to, for example, find you a taxi or the best connecting trains. The staff on board will no longer be checking tickets – because that will be done via new automatic gates on the platforms – so they can focus on service.

InOui will start with 16 Paris-Bordeaux trains in July and progressively we will have 30% of the high-speed services by the end of the year and by the end of 2020 all of the service apart from Ouigo will have this label.

In total we have budgeted €2.5bn for these improvements.

So, is the idea of using ‘oui’ because it sounds positive?

Yes, the image our customers have of Ouibus, OuiCar and Ouigo is very positive. For example 93% of people report being satisfied with the Ouigo service. So the associations are very positive for the customers and it’s about expanding the ‘oui’ concept to our premium high-speed services.

And so it lives up to the name you will make efforts for it to be a really good, high quality experience?

Exactly that.