Riding France’s FIRST PRIVATE Intercity Train Along the GORGEOUS French Riviera!

My local operator now ❤

I hate the shiny surfaces on newer French trains.

My local express service operator 😅 In all seriousness whilst I was sad to see the old Corail units go, these new Transdev units have been rock solid thus far. Though one of them was recently tragically involved in a fatal level crossing crash along the line and is now parked in Cannes awaiting its front end to be given heavy maintenance repairs after the accident

They heard France is switching to Linux so they replace train with zou!do train?

Do you know there's a new YouTube train channel called Not Just Solo Travel? It makes Great videos, I recommend you to subscribe to the channel and comment him about nice train trips

For the vending machine, in the same train but in Normandy (Omneo 1) have a Coffee machine on the single deck middle coach

15:20 But these fares are only for occasional solo travel:
– A 20€ "ZOU ! Malin" card gives you a 30% discount on all regional buses/trains in PACA during 1 year, a person travelling with you can also benefit from the discount (so a one-way trip is 28.56€, or 57.12€ for 2 people travelling together: cheaper than 2 one-way tickets even factoring the 20€ cost of the card)
– A 60€ "Pass Régional 3 jours" will allow you unlimited trips in the whole PACA région for 3 days, 20€ extra for each person travelling with you, up to 8 additional people (so 80€ for 2 people travelling together, cheaper than 2 one-way tickets)

Transdev is in no way the owner or fleet manager of this new rolling stock, nor are the rest of these improvements to be attributed to them.

In regional transit (and contrary to open-access lines such as actual Intercity or TGV lines), Transdev or the SNCF is merely the service operator, and accomplishes what the region, the transit organisation authority, orders them to do, using rolling stock that's also entirely owned (or otherwise sourced) by the region.
Thus, the responsibility of the quality of service for regional transit has been entirely in the hands of the regions since the end of the 1980s and the french decentralization laws.

So the question of who operates the trains is very secondary, since trains and frequency are independent from what company actually operates the line, and the implications of a change in operators by itself are by design supposed to be as irrelevant to the end user as possible.

In that context it's the region Sud that ordered, paid for and owns these Omneo Premium trainsets. It's also the region which leased additional units from other regions and ordered more service on the line as previously. And finally, it's the region who ordered a higher frequency schedule on the line.

It could have done that before, while the SNCF was still the designated operator of that line package, but it chose not to.
Instead, it rolled in all those significant improvements precisely simultaneously with the regional operational tender being awarded to Transdev.

Given the political inclination of the regional direction, it is to be understood as a manipulatory drive of the public opinion to try to put yet another nail in the coffin of the SNCF.
The region direction can claim to have gotten started on "privatizing the rail", and win cheap electoral points from liberals and right-wingers. But since that change of operator alone wouldn't have been seen by itself as a relevant change by the end users, it was needed to add to the transition some actual good things, such as new rolling stock and an improved transit schedule, which it had refused to do before.
In the end the same drivers as before will drive trains that belong to the same entity as before for passengers with the same (region-subsidized) tickets as before, only the end-user are abused and all the operating cash will go towards private interests which will seek the extraction of profits at the expense of the workers and the (remnants of the) social model of the SNCF.

I feel it's important to be aware of this while covering the improvements on this TER line.

14:18 That's Bandol!

What makes it an InterCity service? On a route like this, even if it may make fewer stops, what promotes it into the InterCity category? It uses the same rolling stock as SNCF does