Réseau Ferré de France

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Réseau Ferré de France
Type	state-owned company
Founded	1998
Headquarters	Ave. de France, Paris, France
Area served	France
Industry	Infrastructure & Tracks Proprietor, State Administrator
Parent	Ministère du Transport
Website	www.rff.fr

RFF are also the initials of the Ricardo Franco Front, a Colombian revolutionary guerrilla group; for other uses, see RFF.

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 separate train operations from the railway 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 focusing on debt refinancing, and it contractually delegates the majority of its infrastructure management to the SNCF. In the future, it is expected to be capable of building, maintaining and renovating the French national railway infrastructure on its own. Signalling on RFF infrastructure is implemented and maintained by SNCF.

The creation of RFF was criticised because of the financial options chosen: RFF is subsidised by the French government in order to pay the interest on debt previously borne by the SNCF. SNCF now has a positive operating income and thus enables competition to be opened. The 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 investment capacities of the French rail system.^{[citation needed]}