Hello and bonjour (but with a Belgian accent)!
It is spring 2022, and I’m in the historic coal-mining city of Charleroi
in the former industrial heartland of Belgium.
And today we’re exploring the Charleroi metro,
which is arguably less of a metro,
and more of a tram that somehow got its own bridges and tunnels.
But anyway.
Why are we here?
Well according to Wikipedia, the Charleroi metro is famous
for the parts of the system which were never built,
partially built,
or fully completed but not opened.
"Fully completed but not opened?"
What’s the story there?
Because if you catch Line 4 from the centre of town,
and look out of the window at the right moment,
you’ll see some mysterious tracks branching off and heading out into the distance.
But they don’t appear on the map,
and trains never seem to go down there.
So where do those tracks go?
And what would we find if we got off the metro and tried to follow them?
This is the metro line that never opened.
Today we’re exploring the lost Line 5 of the Charleroi Metro,
although actually it was the third one to be built,
but that’s not important right now.
Our first mission is to find where exactly the tracks come out above ground.
And fortunately, that’s not too difficult;
they emerge into the daylight at the back end of this small park
on the edge of the city centre.
In one direction the tracks head back into the tunnel where we were just now,
but we’re going to follow them in the other direction
and see what we can find.
This is Neuville station, constructed in 1987, and never opened.
Apparently behind here there are still escalators going up to a ticket office, and platforms,
but unfortunately the entrance is blocked up, and we can’t go in.
So we’re not going to waste any more time here
because clearly, this is not the end of the line,
and if there are going to be more stations,
then I want to visit ALL of them.
Is that an allotment?
"Bonjour !"
Stations on the Charleroi metro
are often only a few hundred metres apart from each other
and sure enough it’s not long before we find another one.
This is Chet station.
Or possibly CheT...
I really should have asked the locals how they pronounce it.
Just like Neuville, it was constructed in 1987, to a pretty much identical design,
and of course, never opened.
But unlike Neuville, here,
I was able to walk straight in.
Let’s be clear - I’m not sure I was supposed to be able to.
But it seemed daft not to take the opportunity
to show you what these ghost stations look like on the inside.
Now, let’s be honest, I’ve visited some colossal wastes of money on this channel,
but this is on another scale.
It’s not just a ghost station, it’s a whole ghost line
that was abandoned without ever being used.
It's like something from a horror story,
if horror stories were written by accountants.
So what on earth happened here?
Well the short answer is: Belgian Politics.
And let’s face it, trying to explain Belgian Politics
is a bit like trying to run a Belgian restaurant.
You can’t do it without an awful lot of waffle.
But we’ve still got a whole abandoned metro line to explore (and explain)
so let’s quickly go through the basics.
Belgium is split into 3 official regions:
there’s Flanders, the Dutch-speaking bit,
Wallonia, the French-speaking bit that Charleroi is in,
and Brussels, the bilingual and theoretically neutral capital city.
There’s also a small German-speaking community
who won’t be happy if I don’t mention them,
but for big regional issues, they kind of get thrown in with Wallonia.
Now these days Brussels has given Flanders and Wallonia so much independence
that they make their own separate decisions about most things
and barely talk to each other unless they have to.
They’re basically a divorced couple who for some reason still live together.
But it wasn’t always like that.
Go back fifty or sixty years and the ties are a bit closer;
back then, Brussels makes all the big decisions,
and the regions maybe have more of a sibling rivalry;
they’re either arguing with each other,
or they’re complaining to Brussels because the other one did something
and it’s not FAIR.
At least... that’s how it seems to me from the outside.
Belgian viewers,
you can explain it better than me,
let us know in the comments how you see it.
But to sum up,
Brussels always has to find some way of making both regions happy
and keeping the family together.
So back in the 1960s, the government comes up with a cunning plan.
“Starting from today, any big project that is approved on one side of the country
must be matched with equal investment in a similar project on the other.”
This idea that everything that’s done on one side must also be done on the other
became known in Belgium as "waffle-iron politics".
(I think you can work out why.)
And in theory it was a brilliant idea;
it ensured everything was fair
and neither side could complain about anything ever again.
And if you haven’t spotted the problem with the plan yet,
don’t worry, it’s about to become quite obvious.
A few years later, the government decided to make a major investment
by building metro systems in each of Belgium’s 5 biggest cities:
one would be in Brussels, of course,
while the other 4 would be split equally
between the Dutch-speaking cities of Antwerp & Ghent,
and the French-speaking cities of Liege, and Charleroi.
However, the cities of Ghent and Liege promptly pulled out of the plan,
for various local reasons,
and under the waffle-iron policy,
the Ghent funds were reallocated to Antwerp,
and the Liege funds were reallocated to Charleroi.
As a result, Belgium’s fourth-biggest city was now getting enough funding
to build a metro for over a million people.
And before anyone could say “do they actually need this...?”
Charleroi was given the green light to build EIGHT metro lines.
(For comparison, that’s 3 more lines than Amsterdam,
5 more than Rome,
and 8 more than Tampa, Florida.)
But although the project was, let’s say, ambitious
that doesn’t necessarily mean it was a bad idea.
One good thing about it was that it would be ready
for the future urban expansion and economic growth of the city.
But unfortunately that’s exactly the kind of urban expansion and economic growth
that 1970s Charleroi absolutely failed to experience.
Before they could even build the first station,
the global steel market collapsed,
Charleroi’s main industries began to shut down,
and the local population actually started shrinking,
eventually falling from the fourth biggest city in the country to the fifth behind Ghent.
Despite all of that though, construction went ahead on the first four lines
and as you can see, the tracks on this branch got as far as…
wherever this is.
But this isn’t quite the end of the line;
there still two more half-built abandoned stations that the tracks never quite made it to.
So while we go on and try to find those,
let’s get back to the story,
because something dramatic is about to happen in Belgian Politics.
It’s now the 1980s.
A new government has come in in Brussels
and they decide to end the waffle-iron policy,
and instead, as I kind of mentioned earlier,
they start giving more power directly to the regions.
And that is what all of this boils down to.
Because with parts of the Charleroi metro already half-built by the state,
with state money,
the decision to continue building it now belongs to Wallonia,
but its now Wallonia’s money.
At this point, the region decided that maybe Charleroi didn’t actually need all 8 lines
and perhaps 1 and a half would be enough for now.
(Which coincidentally is exactly how much of it was already open at the time.)
And so the rest of the lines were famously left unbuilt, partially built,
or fully completed but not opened.
"There is… a lot of glass here."
There is some good news though:
the eastern branch was eventually completed and opened in the 1990s,
and the northern one in 2013,
but the south-eastern one, Line 5, well…
that’s this one.
And as much as I enjoy bouncing around these abandoned stations
and yaddering on about it on YouTube,
let’s be honest here:
Charleroi has had tough few decades economically,
and it’s pretty shocking to see such a waste of public money
in a city that could have really benefitted from that investment.
But hey, we can’t change the past;
we CAN change the future.
Sorry
[aside] Did a motivational poster write this?!
Anyway, there might just be some light at the end of the Line 5 tunnel.
Last year local news reported that the city had secured funding to finally open the line.
The ghost stations will be brought back to life,
and the route will be extended to connect with a new hospital
and an out-of-town retail park.
Work is scheduled to start next year,
and if all goes well it should open in 2026.
And after 40 years, we will finally find out
if the residents of this part of Charleroi
actually needed a metro in the first place.
If you’d like to visit Charleroi,
and explore its slightly bizarre metro system,
the city is an hour from Brussels by train,
or you can fly directly to Charleroi airport,
which is served by companies like Ryanair, Wizz Air, Air Belgium, and Air Algeria,
but not the Charleroi Metro.
Which says it all really doesn’t it.
And if you’re wondering when is the best time to visit the city,
that’ll be in about 5 years
when they’ve finished all this construction work.
By then the place should look a lot nicer.
And that’s about it for today,
so as always, thank you all for watching,
and I will see you soon.