Réseau Ferré de France

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RFF are also the initials of the Ricardo Franco Front, a Colombian revolutionary guerrilla group.

Réseau Ferré de France, RFF, is the company that owns and maintains the French national railway network. The trains themselves are operated by SNCF, the national railway company, but due to new European Union rules, the French government was required to divide the operations from the infrastructure.

The RFF was constituted with SNCF's infrastructure assets, and debts were transferred from the SNCF book to RFF's. Currently, the RFF is mainly a financial structure focussing on debt refinancing, and it contractually delegates the most part of it infrastructure management to the SNCF. In the future, it is expected to be able to handle directly building, maintenance and renovation of the French national railways. Signalling on RFF infrastructure is implemented and maintained by SNCF.

RFF creation was criticised because of the financial options chosen: RFF is subsidised by the French government in order to pay the interests on the debt previously borne by the SNCF. SNCF has now a positive operating income and thus enables competition to be opened. Creation of the RFF structure was dismissed by political opponents and some economists as a move to liberalise French railways at the taxpayer's expense. Another criticism is that RFF's policy of stopping losses is that it hampers the French rail system investment capacities.