France’s national train operating company needs to expand and treat the whole of Europe as its domestic market amid the sector’s rapid consolidation, its chairman has said.

The comments by Guillaume Pépy in a Financial Times interview come after SNCF this month took a 20 per cent stake in NTV, Europe’s first purely private high-speed train operator, which plans to operate between Rome and Milan. SNCF, which is wholly state-owned, has also this year acquired the shares it did not hold in Geodis, a logistics operator.