Ride a French train for only 1 euro

Oigo Classique is offering 10,000 tickets for its routes, but you only have 24 hours to get in on the deal

Ouigo Classique, the calm-paced arm of the low-budget French train company is celebrating its first year birthday with an even lower-budget offer – 1-euro tickets. Altogether, 10,000 tickets will be on sale at this price, meaning that they’ll be sold on ‘first-come, first-serve’ basis, while stocks last.

“Attention, there will not be enough for everyone”, warns the parent company SNCF in a press release. The tickets will only be up for sale during a 24-hour window on Tuesday, 23 May, from 7 am in the morning on the SNCF website.

Three retro rail routes

Ouigo Classique is thus a new company, but one that relies on the old-school charms of railway transportation. The Classique in the name refers to the fact that the service operates with more vintage electric locomotives and cars.

For train enthusiasts specifically, the cars are Corail model and the locomotives are SNCF Class BB 22200. These date back to the 1970s and 1980s, so for many people they represent a nostalgic trip back to their youth or childhood when they were the main vehicles on French tracks.

The subsidiary operates three routes in France, all of which originate and end in Paris. One of the routes leads to Lyon, through Dijon, and the other two lead to Nantes, but in different ways. The northern arm of the Nantes section passes through Chartres, and the south goes through Blois.

The Ouigo Classique trains go at the same speed as the TER regional trains. That means that here the pleasure of railway travel is emphasized over speed. For comparison, it takes 5 hours to reach Lyon from Paris, whereas a high-speed train covers the distance in 2 hours. However, both ways are 100% eco-friendly.