[1] During the 1960s, French national railway operator SNCF investigated the use of high-power diesel locomotives for heavy express trains on its non-electrified major lines.

[1] The exterior of the locomotive originally bore the operator's standard blue and white livery, produced by designer Paul Arzens.

The original power units had been considered to be noisy and smoky, which had led to a ban of the type by Swiss authorities from Basel’s SNCF station in the early-2000s.

[1] In 2006, Moroccan operator ONCF procured six redundant CC72000s from SNCF to supplement their existing fleet, renumbering these as DF115-120.

[1] The type operated services across the national network, including those between Nantes, Bordeaux and Toulouse in the south-west, between Lyon, Mulhouse, Geneva, Annecy and Grenoble in the east; as well as the core Paris to Clermont-Ferrand route.

[1] Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the SNCF continued its policy of railway electrification, which resulted in a gradual but permanent decline in the need for diesel-hauled express passenger services.

CC72061/062/064 were fitted with Scharfenberg couplers, enabling them to haul TGV Atlantique sets along the unelectrified line between Nantes and Les Sables-d’Olonne; this prevented any conventional services being run with these three locomotives as the modification necessitated the removal of their buffers.