Cycling UK Forum

Four of us are going to be travelling with bikes from Nantes to Paris in September on the TGV.

Have heard that you are now required to put bikes in a bike bag before transporting.

Has anyone been on the TGV with a bike recently and/or know the current position?

It was bikes in bags when I travelled on TGVs in June of this year.

I was told some TGVs can take bikes but only on a few selected routes. However I could not find any information.

The TGV lines heading east (Strasbourg &c) now have space to carry un-bagged bikes; for the rest, you still need the bike bag. Some info here (in French..): http://www.velo.sncf.com/. The ever-helpful German railways site (http://reiseauskunft.bahn.de/bin/query.exe/en) suggests that you still can't take un-bagged bikes on the TGV to Nantes (though there are non-TGV ways of making the journey -- just takes twice as long!)

It's slightly out of date (you can now carry unbagged bikes on Eurostar), but this looks like the most comprehensive overview of when you can and cannot carry unbagged bikes on French trains (and it's in English):

http://www.fubicy.org/spip.php?article107

Go to the sncf site and look at the timetables ( 'horaires' ). If the TGV carries bikes it will have a bike symbol on the information page for a particular route / time - the down side is that you can only get the standard €10 ticket for each bike journey by actually going to France and booking at a station !

The info in the 'fubicy' website posted above by Andy Miller is a good overview but not 100% acccurate in my view - it's still pretty good though !

As it says, you have to book your ticket and the bike at the same time and so can't do it via internet. I've taken my whole bike on around 20 TGVs now and - since I live near the Channel and frequently go over for the day - have booked my tickets at Calais Gare.

There are trains that run from Paris to Strasbourg etc as stated above but many many more too. I've taken bikes on the out and back routes from Lille to Bordeaux, Toulouse and Biarritz; Marseilles to Valence and Lyon; Paris to Le Mans and La Rochelle .. at various times in the last few years. In all cases I booked as explained and the bike went in a 'fourgon' - basically a compartment with 4 big hooks hanging from the ceiling. See the following link from Crazyguyonabike website for more details and pics ..

http://www.crazyguyonabike.com/andyjef

.. and look at the last pages on the Calais - Cassis journal or the 1st Boulogne one at the end.

If you're going a fair distance in France it's better to change in Lille rather than Paris as you simply switch platform ( 'quai' ) rather than stations as in Paris.

Finally, if you can try and get a 'Prems' ticket .. these are released 3 months before the day of travel and can be very cheap indeed. If you're taking a bagged bike and don't need to book in France, then get on the internet at 11pm the day before 3 months before the day of travel - as it will be midnight in France so you are first in the queue !! ( If that makes sense ?? )

Andy

Ok done the trip now and can confirm that at least on the Nantes - Paris route you had to have a bike bag - there were no bike racks at all.

We were upstairs on the TGV yesterday morning so it was quite entertaining getting two bikes and all our panniers on and finding somewhere to put them. I ended up tying mine to a railing otherwise everyone was going to dump their luggage on top of ther bike.