Hello and bonjour!
It is November 2021 and I’m on Line B heading out of Paris for a mini-adventure
because hidden in the forests southwest of the city is an old abandoned railway.
And as you know, that’s basically Tim-catnip.
But this is not just any old abandoned railway.
After it closed in the 1950s, it went on to have an extraordinary second life,
and I have three words for you:
experimental rocket trains!
I mean, you all knew that France tested rocket-powered hovertrains
on a disused railway in the 1960s, right?
Right?
Well today, we’re uncovering the story of the
wait for it...
Paris to Chartres via Gallardon line.
And to do that, we’re getting off way out in Zone 5
at a quiet little suburban station called La Hacquiniere.
So this is where our adventure starts today,
and coincidentally, this is the least used station on Line B.
I’m half-expecting Geoff Marshall to pop up and tell us about station usage stats
and dot matrix indicators.
GEOFF: But of course, we’re not here to see any of that.
TIM: No, we’re here to see a disused rai...
Bonjour !
WHAT?
Er… so Geoff. What are you doing in Paris?
Finally, finally, after many months, weeks, years, of planning,
we actually met up in Paris!
So er, after you rather cheekily did “Least Used Station in France”
Yeah sorry about that
We’re here all weekend.
We’re doing least used metro tomorrow,
and we’re doing least used RER combined with…
well I don’t know! Whatever you’ve got planned for me!
We’re going on an adventure.
An adventure.
Yep.
A Tim Travelling adventure. I’m so excited!
So here’s the plan (that I haven’t told Geoff about).
For a few hundred metres right here,
the old line runs parallel (ish) to the RER B route
that we’ve just come down on from Paris.
Which means Geoff and I have only got a short walk
up the road and through the woods
in order to find it.
From there we’re going to hike along the path of the old railway
until we get to a small town called Gometz,
which in the 1960s was the birthplace of the legendary Aérotrain.
But more about that later,
because first there’s something more important we need to do.
We’ve got off the train and the first thing you’ve done is said
“can we go and get a tea?”
- Well I’ve had a
…from a boulangerie patisserie!
- I’ve had a coffee this morning but I need to know if they sell...
Two coffees.
I have had two coffees.
I don’t want to say "can I have...?", I need to know how to say "do you sell tea?"
Well just say “vous avez…?” - "do you have…?"
- Vous avez ?
Vous avez du thé ?
I’m on it.
T: Gometz is what we’re aiming for. We’re walking to Gometz.
G: Let’s do it.
T: We just need to find our way into the forest.
G: Like, what does she do if she wants a cup of tea?
T: I don’t know!
Probably goes next door the bar I guess?
I reckon we go up here Geoff.
It’s kind of a… long flat straight path.
G: Is this an old railway?
T: He’s on to it already you know.
G: I am on to it. Is that what you’ve brought me to?
Is it? Are we on an old abandoned line?
T: We might just be doing a disused railway.
G: Oh yes!
T: Happy?
G: I’ll be happy once I’ve had a tea.
So why was this railway built in the first place?
Well it’s a classic story of two rival companies and some stupid decisions.
The West Railway had already built a line from Paris to Chartres via Versailles
which still exists today, and continues on to Brittany and the rest of western France.
Meanwhile the State Railway, owned by the government,
had a line coming into Chartres from the west
but no connection from there to Paris.
So passengers on State trains needed to switch onto the private company
to continue their journeys.
Not a big deal for most people,
but for government ministers,
particularly those from western France who had to use the route,
the message it sent out was all wrong.
They thought state-owned trains should run on state-owned tracks
the whole way into the capital.
And in 1907,
after years of bickering about the exact route,
and despite having absolutely no economic argument for it,
the project went ahead.
Which sounds daft enough,
but two years later the State Railway bought the West Railway.
And the project STILL went ahead.
Why? I don’t know.
If any of you were part of French government decision making in 1909
please do let us know in the comments.
G: It's a bridge! Well hang on, is that… so this is the railway bridge…
T: Yep
G: And that’s just a road…
T: I mean yeah it’s just a track isn’t it
G: This is deadly! Look I can stand… there’s nothing stopping me falling off here
T: Yeah they don’t really have health and safety in France...
G: Oh is that not a thing?
T: Not quite so much.
Construction started at the Chartres end of the route
and the double-track main line had got as far as Gallardon,
about ¼ of the way into Paris,
when the first World War broke out.
And by the end of the war France was so short of steel
that the government decided to rip out one of the two tracks.
But the project still continued, it was just downgraded to a single line.
G: Beautiful! Now where's my tea you...What's that?
From then on though progress was slow,
with the tracks reaching the town of Limours in 1922
and finally reaching the edge of the Paris suburbs in 1930 at Massy,
a major railway junction where there was a connection with another rival company.
By now they were only a few kilometres short of Paris
and they ran a few trains along the nearly-completed line,
but then two things happened.
First, the government nationalised the railways,
which removed once and for all the reason for building the route in the first place,
and then the second World War broke out.
Germany occupied France,
they started using the line for military convoys,
that led to the Allies bombing three of the viaducts,
and that was that.
In the end, after the war, it just wasn’t worth repairing it,
and the railway was officially closed in 1953.
But luckily a large chunk of it has now been converted to a cycle path
and you can come here and see what might have been.
G: There is a thing coming up
T: There is a thing.
G: Tim is the drone coming out?
T: The drone might be coming out.
G: There's a drone moment coming up, I can sense it.
My drone spidey sense suddenly went off
T: Your drone radar...
G: Oh nice!
*classical music swells as Tim reveals a view that actually is quite nice for once*
G: Nicer on a clear summer day...
T: Yeah
G: Slightly misty on an Autumnal November day, but all the same...
This is the Viaduc des Fauvettes, one of the viaducts that got bombed during the war,
but it has since been beautifully restored
mostly thanks to the local rock climbing community.
G: Where'd he go?
T: He's gone.
G: Where?
G: You could pay me a lot of money and I would never do that.
T: No? Not your thing?
G: Really not my thing!
T: Why not?!
T: Bravo!
G: How do you say "how do you feel?"
G: Tim?
T: Yep
G: Got a question
T: Yep
G: Où sont les jardins partagés ?
With Geoff now approaching 3 hours without tea,
the situation was clearly becoming critical,
but fortunately it wasn’t much further before we hit the outskirts of Gometz.
And if you squint,
you can still just about imagine the old steam trains coming through here,
but no-one in Gometz could have imagined what was about to happen next.
A few years after the line closed,
an aviation engineer called Jean Bertin got some of his engineer mates together,
and founded a company who were going to revolutionise transport.
And I’m not an engineer, but as far as I understand it the plan was:
let’s take an aeroplane,
a racing car,
a train,
and a hovercraft,
mix them together,
and see what happens.
And what they came up with...
was the Aerotrain.
*** Music: Theme from UFO ***
The straight lines and gentle curves of the abandoned railway
were the perfect place for Bertin to test his experimental high-speed hovertrain.
As you can see in these images, Aerotrain No.1 had no wheels
and glided along a T-shaped concrete test track powered by an aircraft propeller.
It was arguably less of a train
and more of a rail-guided aeroplane hovercraft thing.
Whatever it was,
initial tests proved it could run safely at speeds of up to 200kmh.
And next they wanted to test it at even higher speeds
but unfortunately the 7km track between Gometz and Limours
wasn’t long enough for it to go any faster
if it was going to stop before it got to the other end.
So what do you do if your hovertrain test track is too short?
That’s right,
you put a rocket on the train.
This improved acceleration quite significantly
and on the 4th December 1967 the temporarily rocket-powered Aerotrain
broke the world speed record for a railway vehicle
at 345kmh.
And the track it did it on…
is still here.
G: Oh wow! Ok. That is cool.
T: (apologetically) It’s only a little segment of it...
T: That’s pretty much how it worked!
T: You just need to make a cushion of air…
G: A cushion of air!?
T: …and then you go faster!
You have to remember these are the days before the TGV
and anything that went this much faster than a normal train was taken very seriously
because at the time it genuinely could have been the future.
And going faster
is exactly what this thing did.
This is Lady Penelope’s car from Thunderbir
Sorry.
This is Aerotrain No. 2.
Bertin’s main design criteria for Aerotrain No.2 were that
a) it should go even faster
and b)
yep that’s pretty much it.
It was fitted with a jet engine and could achieve speeds of 300kmh in regular testing.
But as we all know, you haven’t really tested an Aerotrain
until you’ve put a rocket on it.
So they did.
And in January 1969 they broke the speed record again,
this time reaching 422kmh.
Of course, I should say it was just a test.
They were never going to use a rocket in everyday service
(apparently it’s quite bad for the environment,
and the neighbours were starting to complain about the noise.)
But what they’d done was prove that on a full length track,
where the vehicle could get up to that speed without needing a rocket,
the Aerotrain would be able transport passengers safely and smoothly
at speeds far beyond a conventional railway.
G: Are you doing that thing where you’re filming again and I don’t realise?
T: Yep!
G: Where’s… That’s a thing. That’s a model.
T: That is a sculpture. It’s a sort of stylised sculpture of it, it’s not the real thing.
G: Where’s the track?
T: Just beyond.
Yes! If you thought that little piece of track stuck inside a roundabout
was all that was left...
well, there's a bit more!
And you can find it... right here.
T: This is what we came all the way to see.
G: I feel like I’m doing a Tim Traveller thumbnail, I’m like, look!
And this is it, stretching away into the distance:
the original Aerotrain test track.
You can actually follow it all the way from here to Limours but erm…
I think it might be time to get Geoff a tea.
Now if you’ve been to France in the last 50 years,
you may have noticed that it is not full of Aerotrains
speeding around carrying French people from city to city.
But that doesn’t mean these tests were a failure.
The Gometz tests were a success.
And the only reason they abandoned this test track
was so that they could go about an hour south of here
and build a bigger one.
A longer one.
A better one.
But that will be a story for a whole other video...
So Geoff!
Tim!
How was your day?
Er… lacking in tea!
It was an absolute pleasure having you along.
Thank you, that was a lot of fun!
Thank you for letting me bring you into this random field in the middle of France
and sit on a piece of concrete.
We will have another video on Geoff’s channel where we will be visiting…
what are we doing on your channel?
The Least Used Metro Station.
Yes! If you’d like to see more Geoff and me action
then Geoff’s video is out now over on his channel!
- It's Tim! -
- The Bakerloo line of the Paris métro... -
There’ll be a link on screen in a moment,
and in the description below,
so do check it out,
and subscribe to Geoff for more excellent railway shenanigans!
And until next time,
- au revoir
thank you very much for watching,
and I’ll see you soon.