Hellooooo, and bonjour! If you’ve watched my videos before, you know we don’t mind
exploring an abandoned place or visiting a weird railway on this channel. But with Valentine’s
Day just around the corner, I thought I’d show you that I can be romantic too,
so I’ve brought you all to Paris,
to see an abandoned railway.
At the dawn of the 1900s this line
was carrying 30 million passengers a year; but in 1934 its stations closed their doors forever.
So what happened? Why was it abandoned?
And why do the tracks seem to have been kept in such good condition?
Welcome to Paris’s lost railway: la Petite Ceinture.
This is the old station at Boulevard d’Ornano in the north of Paris. It was one of 30 passenger
stations that once served Chemin de fer de Petite Ceinture, which literally translates
as the little belt railway, a disused line that ran in a 32km ring all the way round
the city. The building is now a café called La Recyclerie, full of boho chic Parisian
ladies and the annoying kind of man who’s got a beard, a checked shirt, and a laptop
so he can work remotely on his stupid job in online media.
So I’m going to fit right in.
The idea of building a circular railway line around Paris
dates all the way back to the 1840s and the very beginning of railways in France.
This 1846 map of the city shows new terminus stations springing up at St Lazare,
Gare du Nord, the Gare d’Austerlitz which back then was called the Gare d’Orléans,
Denfert-Rochereau and Montparnasse. They would soon be joined by the Gare de l’Est, then
called the Gare de Strasbourg, and the Gare de Lyon. The problem was that they were built
by 5 different railway companies, and because each company was worried about protecting
their regional monopolies, they were running 5 completely separate and unconnected networks.
Everyone could see this needed fixing urgently, even if you were a French politician, and
the government decided that it would be a good idea to build a circular railway to link
the networks up. The plan had military backing too; the army thought it would be a great
way of transporting troops and equipment around the 32km ring of walls and defensive fortifications
that they had just finished building. And actually it would have been quite useful when
they were building it mais bon never mind. By 1860, a mere 15 years later, the companies
had got as far as building a line half way round the city. It was enough to connect 5
of the major stations, and transfer freight between the 5 networks, and they were pretty
much happy to leave it at that. Meanwhile one of the companies, the Chemin de Fer de
l’Ouest, had started France’s first suburban passenger service with a line down to Autueil,
a lovely leafy area to the southwest which was coincidentally the same place that a lot
of rich Parisians had bought second homes. Between them, the freight line and the passenger
line ran ¾ of the way round the edge of Paris, and at this point the companies came under
a lot of pressure from the French government who were quite keen to hurry up and complete
the circle in time to carry passengers to the Universal Exhibition of 1867 that they
were about to organise. In the space of a few years, hastily-constructed passenger stations
were opened on the former freight line, the passenger line was adapted for use by freight
trains, and a new section connected Autueil to the Gare d’Orléans across the south.
The whole thing opened in February 1867, just in time for the exhibition, although the circle
wasn’t quite fully completed until 1869 when a short tunnel provided the final missing link.
In the mean time, Paris itself had been busy growing
and spreading out, what had originally been planned as a freight line in the countryside was now
a passenger line on the edge of the city. 5 million passengers in 1880 became 17 million
in 1890, and 38 million in 1900, boosted by another Universal Exhibition that year.
By this stage it was so busy that most of the freight trains had been shunted out onto a new circle
further out, which was predictably called the Grande Ceinture.
But something else happened in 1900: the opening of the first Paris metro line. The creation
of an east-west link directly through the centre of the city started to relieve some
of the traffic from the Petite Ceinture and as more metro lines were added over the next
few years, more and more passengers switched over. By 1910 the service on the petite ceinture
was cut from 8 trains an hour to 4 and by the 1920s passenger numbers had dropped back
down under 10 million a year. The Petite Ceinture was effectively a victim of its own success:
it proved that there was demand for a metro system, and then lost most of its traffic
to it. Eventually the government pulled the plug and on 1st April 1934 the stations were
closed to passengers for the final time. The trains were replaced by 3 bus lines running
parallel to the old tracks, although a tiny part of the Petite Ceinture lived on in the
route numbers that these were given: the PC1, PC2 and PC3.
For half a century the railway passed into a kind of purgatory; semi-abandoned, but still
used by freight trains and the occasional empty passenger train that needed to be transferred
from one place to another. Parts of the line were gradually shut down in the 80s and 90s
but it wasn’t until the early 2000s that the very final section was closed. Despite
its potentially huge redevelopment value, the land was sealed off and the tracks were
left in place, just in case they might be needed again one day. And as the old railway
began silently collecting weeds, rubbish, and a few adventurous pieces of graffiti,
it became quite a weird place, simultaneously in the middle of the city and completely removed
from it. Of course, you can’t really have a 32km
corridor of unused space in the heart of Paris without a whole load of people arguing about
what you should do with it. Because the land is still owned by the railway, the city doesn’t
actually have any direct power over it, but in some areas the two sides are working together
to give it back to the public as a green space. In the last 10 years, several sections have
been opened up and you can now explore them perfectly legally. But don’t worry, there
are still plenty of parts that are officially off-limits if you prefer to explore illegally.
So what would the Petite Ceinture look like today if it had survived? Well probably something
like this. In fact exactly like this. The old station at Avenue Henri Martin was reopened
in the 1980s when an extension to line C of the suburban network, the RER, brought trains
running through here again, and in fact for 5 stops between here and Porte de Clichy you’re
travelling on the Petite Ceinture route through Petite Ceinture stations. But could a passenger
service ever return to the rest of the line? Well half the station buildings have been
lost to history, and some of the infrastructure could use a lick of paint, but the track is
still there, the route has been kept safe from development, and Paris isn’t getting
any less crowded. If the metro becomes more congested over the next few decades, it’s
not unthinkable that the same system that killed off the Petite Ceinture in the 1930s
could also be responsible for bringing it back to life.
If you’d like to take a romantic trip along the Petite Ceinture, the best [legal] places
to do so are in the southern parts of the city – I recommend the elevated section
between Balard and Porte de Versailles or the woodland section between Auteuil and La
Muette. Both of these are about 1½km long and fully wheelchair accessible although the
woodland one might be a bit dodgy in wet weather. If you’re watching this video in the future
then it’s possible that they have now opened up more sections and it’s also possible
you’ll get flattened by a train. Either way thanks for watching, I hope you enjoyed
the video, and I will see you soon.