How long does it take if you travel to Marseille from Paris in the regular TGV train?

Rob: Hello Finn.
Finn: Hi Rob.
Rob: Today we’re talking about high-speed train travel. Many countries have very fast trains that whisk people from city to city in super-quick time.
Finn: Yes, we might think that air travel is the transport of the future but it seems high-speed train travel is becoming just as popular.
Rob: How about a question? Which country currently holds the Guinness record for the fastest train running on a national railway system?
Finn: I’m going to say China.
Rob: I’ll let you know the answer at the end of programme. Back to our discussion about highspeed rail travel. We know that it has many benefits—good things: it helps to take traffic off the road, it causes less pollution, it can transport or move lots of people and it’s quick.
Finn: Yes, speed is important. Now, the TGV train in France takes about three hours to travel over 750 kilometres from the capital, Paris, to Marseille in the south—very impressive.
Rob: And the AVE—Spain’s ultra-modern high-speed train—stole 20 percent of the national airlines’ customers when it started a service from Madrid to Barcelona.
Finn: But the UK has been slow to build such high-speed rail lines. It has one from London to Paris but the government wants to build another one—called HS2—connecting London to the middle and north of England.
Rob: The Transport Secretary, Patrick McLoughlin, thinks one line is not good enough. He used the word "essential" to mean a new line to connect British cities has to be built.
Finn: But plans to build HS2 are controversial—not everyone agrees and there is much discussion. Some say other areas of the country will miss out on the economic benefits.
Rob: And it will be very very expensive to build—although some experts say for every ￡ 1 spent, it will bring ￡ 2 into the economy.
Finn: There are also concerns that some of the countryside will be destroyed. So these are just some of the arguments and it could be a long time before a final decision is made.
Rob: So for now we’ll just have to accept that our trains in the UK will carry on at a sedate speed while we watch with envy as another country’s high-speed train passes us by!
Finn: Er, yes, bat which country’s train is the fastest?
Rob: The record actually belongs to France. It ran a modified version of its TGV train on its network at a speed of 574. 8 km/h.
Finn: That’s 357. 2 miles per hour.
Rob: That train ran on a railway track—but a train that uses magnets to float above the track is being developed in Japan that will run, at a slightly slower speed, at 500 km/h.