the less fun part of traveling

It looks like I'm going to be spending all of 9 September traveling; it takes 2.75 - 3 hours to get from Stratford upon Avon to London St. Pancras by train, so I'm going to try to leave around 7:30am to be able to catch the 11:05 Eurostar from London to Paris (2.25 hours, 3.25 hours if you count the time change). From there, I think it's another 2 - 2.5 hours by train from Paris to Nancy. So, I'm probably going to get in to Nancy and decide to just go straight to my hotel, depending on how late things are planned to go at AiML. I really wish conferences would have preliminary programmes (things like "we start at this time on the starting day, end at this time on the ending day, and expect to begin around X each morning and end at Y each evening") available before people started thinking about their travel arrangements.

BTW, can anyone tell me the website for the French rail system? I'm trying to figure out if I should purchase my ticket from Paris to Nancy in advance, and also make my plans to get back to Amsterdam from Nancy on 12 September.