The TGV commercial service opened to the public between Paris and Lyon on 27 September 1981. France thus entered the era of high-speed rail seventeen years after Japan. Interestingly, the first TGV driver had a son called Patrick; it was in his honour, but also in order to better distinguish the different trainsets being tested in the French factories, that the very first TGV trainset was nicknamed Patrick. The Cité du Train-Patrimoine SNCF in Mulhouse presents a life-size model of the driver’s cabin of the Euroduplex TGV of 2011.