>>1222219Enter Roger Tallon. He's 2 years older than Cooper, and narrowly missed the chance to get to design the original production look for the first gen TGVs (the public contest between his and cooper's design was deemed inconclusive, so Cooper won by virtue of being Alsthom's in-house designer). Other than that he's pretty much considered the father and lead of the French industrial design school and designed enough TVs/Fridges/Bikes/coffee tables/seats/whatever for his name to be known by the common pleb of the era.
But I digress, Tallon gets another chance at painting TGVs with the opening of the Atlantic High Speed Line (which was really only high speed for 45 minutes between Paris and Le Mans up until recently, as most of western France already has a very decent 200 km/h conventional rail network).
And this is how the "TGV Atlantique" livery came to life, and for nearly 25 years it accomplished the job Tallon wanted: give the TGV fleet a distinctive, modern (by late 80s standards) and unified paintjob. Now that last bit is pretty interesting, as that's probably the first and only time that happened (disastrous paint scheme management, told you)
As with Cooper's orange (which by the mid-90s was considered very much dated, leading to a hasty respray of the early orange sets), Tallon saw some of his design cues propagate to conventional mainline stock (most notably, red 1st class coach doors and green 2nd class coach doors).
Roger Tallon was also a smart interior designer, producing an aesthetically pleasing and timeless interior that has the added benefit of being a joy to work on, most of the light maintenance involving well-thought independent assemblies that wouldn't require any tools to be pulled apart.
Also TGV RD best TGV, since that's the question here (pic related, 20 year old power units with brand new Duplex rakes)
