Hello and bonjour!
It is a sunny September Saturday
and I’m on a train heading out of Paris into the deepest eastern suburbs
and we’re going to station 20 minutes out called Noisy-le-Grand.
And yes, we can all see that says “Noisy” [English pronunciation],
but the French insist on pronouncing it “Noisy” [French pronunciation].
Anyway, as you come up the escalators here,
and out of the station exit,
if you look to the right,
you’ll see this slightly weird mural
and a pair of padlocked metal doors.
What you are looking at is the entrance to a phantom metro.
There is a whole underground system behind there
that was supposed to open in 1993 but it never did.
And in the 29 years since then hardly anyone has ever been allowed in.
This morning though, something’s happening.
At 10am today, and for one weekend only,
they are finally opening the doors.
So, erm… shall we have a look?
This is what was supposed to be the main entrance and ticket hall
of the Noisy-le-Grand mini metro.
(By the way, I said "hardly anyone has ever been allowed in here";
you may notice that one or two graffiti artists
have managed to bypass security over the years.)
But otherwise the decoration is untouched since the 1990s.
There are some glorious old posters here
excitedly announcing the arrival of the new metro,
and I really wanted to try and buy a ticket,
but unfortunately the machine only accepts Francs.
The idea of building a mini metro in Noisy-le-Grand was born in the late 1980s
and it was only ever planned to be a short branch line
with just two stations –
this one here, that connects with Line A of the Paris suburban network,
and another one, 500m west, that was going to serve a new business district.
And because it was the late 1980s, you would make that trip
in driverless pod vehicles
whizzing underground on an automated loop.
And let’s be honest, that’s what we’re really here to see.
So you know what?
I think we’re going to have to head down these stairs!
Because I’m not sure the escalator’s working today...
And here’s what you find at the bottom of the stairs: the old platforms.
This is where you would have hopped on and off your little pod vehicles
- and yes, they are still down here!
Admittedly they’re in a bit of a state these days,
but you can still see roughly what they were supposed to look like.
The system was called the SK4000
and it was designed and built by a French company called Soulé.
They'd been dabbling in pod transport for a little while:
this poster back in the ticket hall talks about the success of the earlier SK2000 systems
built for exhibition events in Yokohama, Vancouver, and here in France.
But those were all lightweight systems that didn’t really need to last;
the SK4000 was a heavier, more serious, higher-capacity version;
and it was the first time they were building one for an urban environment and underground.
So how did it work?
Each cabin could carry a maximum of about 10-15 people,
and although they had wheels, they had no motors on board;
instead they were propelled from underneath by a cable that ran along between the rails.
It’s a bit like how a funicular railway works.
But unlike a funicular,
the pods could simply turn around at the end of the line
and come straight back.
So it’s almost more like a cable car or a ski lift;
there’s a constant flow of cabins coming in and out of the station
and there’s always going to be one available for you to jump into.
It was a very clever system; which kind of raises a question:
why on earth did Noisy build something this complicated
when any other suburb would have just bought a bus?
This is Christian Pellerin
- Bonjour !
a French businessman and property developer.
And in 1980s Paris, he was kind of a big deal.
- Je suis une grosse affaire.
He’d made his fortune during the rapid development of La Défense,
Paris’s skyscraper-filled financial district,
and having built quite a lot of what you see in that photograph,
he was now looking for his next big project.
(I think you can see where this is going.)
In 1988 Monsieur Pellerin announced plans to build a shiny new business district
in the up-and-coming suburb of Noisy-le-Grand.
And I think he saw it had potential to become the eastern suburbs’ answer to La Défense
in the west,
although perhaps on a slightly smaller scale.
But it was still going to have high rise office buildings,
a big shopping centre,
and you guessed it,
its very own mini metro line.
Now the metro line didn’t need to be a pioneering custom-made design,
or to have futuristic autonomous pod vehicles,
or to be a metro line,
but that was kind of the point.
Basically the whole thing was a deliberate piece of civil overengineering.
He wanted everything to look and feel like the future;
something different and special that would attract businesses here
rather than your average Parisian suburb.
And if you’ve ever been to Noisy-le-Grand
– I don’t know, maybe you got off at the wrong stop on the way to Disneyland –
you can kind of see why he wanted to build it here:
the whole place looks exactly like what the 1980s thought the future was going to be.
But unfortunately, what the future actually looked like was economic collapse.
By the time the metro was completed and ready to open in 1993,
half the Western World was in recession,
demand for construction had dropped through the floor,
and the shiny new business district that the metro was built to serve
was currently a small field with some trees in it.
Noisy-le-Grand was now the proud owner of a state-of-the-art metro line
that didn’t go anywhere.
And long story short, that’s why they never opened it.
But that doesn’t mean they closed it either.
Having spent 70m Francs building the Metro,
or roughly €10m,
(some of which was from public funding),
Monsieur Pellerin and his company didn’t want to just shut it down immediately.
Or maybe more accurately, they weren’t allowed to.
So they maintained it in good operating condition,
in the hope that the economic climate would eventually improve,
and some of the business district might eventually be constructed.
And this is where it gets really weird,
because every so often they'd have to test the mechanism,
so they would switch everything on,
and the little pods would quietly set off,
down the tunnel,
with no one on board.
It really was a proper ghost train.
And that practice continued even after Pellerin’s company predictably went bankrupt.
The system ended up in the hands of the RATP,
Paris’s public transport company,
who kept the tests going,
and would occasionally invite local residents and schoolchildren
to come down and try it.
These lucky people were the only members of the public
ever to see the metro in operation.
(And until today, the only members of the public to see it at all.)
(Legally.)
But of course maintaining a metro costs money,
and they weren’t going to keep it going forever.
Eventually the RATP gave up and closed it down in 1999.
The metro had managed to run for 6 years
without ever opening to the public
or carrying a single paying passenger.
But this was finally the end of the line.
If you’d like to visit the phantom metro of Noisy-le-Grand,
I have good news and bad news.
The bad news is by the time you’re watching this video they’ve closed it up again.
The good news is that’s because they are finally going to do something with it.
After nearly 30 years of neglect,
the local authorities are investing in the abandoned station
and turning it into a
- wait for it -
“underground chic hybrid space”.
It sounds either brilliant or terrible,
but when it opens, it’ll be a 20 minute ride on Line A from central Paris.
And as always,
thank you all for watching,
and I’ll see you...
well, here on opening night in 2025, I guess.