Rhone-Alpes route
 |
| BB26000 at the head of a consist of V2N carriages crosses the Rhone near Amberieu. |
The route is approximately 400 km in length, consisting of the 1500V DC section from Lyon via Amberieu, Culoz, Aix-les-Bains and Chambery to Montmeilian. Then running south, the line continues to Grenoble (in reality this section is non-electrified), and roughly north and east to St Andre-Le-Gaz to Lyon Perrache station (this section is electrified at 25kV AC). At Aix-les-Bains, there is the line to Annecy, and there is the single track line directly from Chambery to St Andre-Le-Gaz.
There is a mixture of trains that run over these lines: TGVs, local TER services, express Italian services to/from Lyon and Paris, and freights, both within France and internationally.
Pierre Porcheron's TER Rhone Alpes route can be downloaded in reasonable-sized chunks (four 20Mb files and one 16Mb file in WinRAR compressed format) from PLM.MSTS or as a 96Mb file from Simtrain-fr.og.
The route installs in a folder named France. Note that the copy web•TrainSim received had a number of activities but no accompanying consists. So to avoid a whole lot of burps and misbehaviour by MSTS, web•TrainSim moved all the ACT files out of the Activities folder and made a couple of his own. You can take advantage of these so at least you can do some exploring - see web•TrainSim downloads. Some activities have also been posted at site.voila.fr/actmsts.
These are some sites which web•TrainSim found useful to learn about the geography of the Rhone-Alpes region and the train services which run:
 |
| BB 25202 pulls out of Lyon-Perrache station on the Rhone-Alpes route. |
 |
| In the background is Lake Bourget which we've been travelling beside for several kilometres since leaving Aix-Les-Bains. Now we're nearly at Culoz. |
|
