A French TGV (Train a Grande Vitesse) at a railway station. The TGV is the fastest passenger train in service in the World. It is used to link the major cities of France, and has drastically reduced journey times. Powered by electricity, it can attain speeds of up to 270 km/h in service, although a prototype reached 380 km/h. Two years after its inauguration, the TGV had reached its target of running the 425 km journey from Paris to Lyon in exactly 2 hours. The French national railway company, SNCF, invested large sums of money to construct new high-speed tracks for the TGV service.