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.
