The End
Beginning in the 1980s the night express trains were gradually replaced by the high-speed TGV trains, which cut the length of the journey from Paris to Nice from 20 hours to five, and this effectively ended the era of luxury night trains to the French Riviera. After a long history, Le Train Bleu ceased to exist under that name in September 2003, when SNCF rebranded all of its principal overnight trains as Service Nuit.
The train coaches remained in use until 9 December 2007, by which time the consist had lost its dining car and most of its sleeping cars. An overnight train between Paris and Nice continues to run under SNCF's Intercités de Nuit brand, but now carries only couchette and reclining seat accommodation and not luxury sleeping cars.
Read more about this topic: Le Train Bleu
Famous quotes related to the end:
“There is no calm philosophy of life here, such as you might put at the end of the Almanac, to hang over the farmer’s hearth,—how men shall live in these winter, in these summer days. No philosophy, properly speaking, of love, or friendship, or religion, or politics, or education, or nature, or spirit; perhaps a nearer approach to a philosophy of kingship, and of the place of the literary man, than of anything else.”
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