The Least Used Railway Station in France

hello bonjour and bonjour it is a chilly january morning and it is far too early for me to be awake and we're back in bezier for the final video from my trip to the southwest of france and today we're going on an adventure into the deep countryside because i don't know if you're like me but when you've been locked down for two months in your own inner city neighborhood all i want to do now that we're allowed to travel again is spend a day out in the middle of nowhere surrounded only by trees and nature and fresh air and all that stuff i am traveling by public transport though so what i'm really looking for is somewhere in the middle of nowhere that has a railway station so i thought well where would be the best place to go that has a railway station but the fewest possible people and that's why today we're gonna try and get to le cabrillo the least used railway station in the whole of france what the well look this guy he's totally stolen my format the least used station in front that's probably just a coincidence no that's what i do i make lease use videos is that simon pig right it is 9 25 in the morning and this is the train to actually not lake happily there's only two trains to lay capital in the day there's one at six in the morning one at six in the evening six in the morning was a little bit too early six in the evening's too late so i'm catching the train at 9 35 in the morning to go one stop further and then i'm going to walk back the line that we're traveling on today is called la lino de los the obrach line i guess it's a very rural and very scenic railway that crosses the highlands of the massive central and eventually connects bezier to clermont 330 kilometers due north the full journey takes six hours and includes the stunning garbi viaduct designed by the same bloke who built that big radio mast back in paris but i'm not going quite that far i'll be getting off after one hour at a station called well this i think i'm gonna wait until we hear the train announce to say that one before i try and pronounce it myself anyway from there it'll be an eight kilometer hike through the middle of nowhere back to lake cabrillo which should give me enough time to get there before 2 23 in the afternoon and the one and only train back to bezier let's hope it doesn't get cancelled one yep i'm very much the only person getting off here welcome to celebration i think the station gets its name from two separate places sale is a village of 300 people and hours walk west of here and rockhold is a village of 200 people and hours walk east so it really does feel like i'm the only human around guess i can probably take this off now anyway i've now got a hike to be getting on with because of course we're going to a place which is even less busy a station that gets 14 passengers a year and we need to get there before 2 23. but while we're doing that well this is the internet and i know some of you are already asking how do we know it's the least used station in france where do they come up with that figure of 14 people a year does this mean we've all been microchipped already and what's bill gates going to do with station usage figures and that means it's time for a trip to pedentry corner okay just to let you know we are going to get properly pedantic here so if you're not a pedant feel free to turn the volume down for the next two minutes and enjoy the hiking montage but for the 99 of us who are still here this is how it works without actually microchipping everyone it is basically impossible to know the true number of people who use every station so instead what they do is the next best thing which is to track the exact number of tickets sold to and from each destination and yes that means you're gonna miss all the people who didn't buy a ticket the people who got off at the wrong stop and the people who are traveling on some kind of explorer ticket but realistically it's the closest we can get now in the uk the government publishes these figures every year so if your name is i don't know what's a typical british name jeffrey marshall if your name is jeffrey marshall you can go on the website and there's a handy pdf file telling you what is the least used station in britain but if your name is je huala marcel you can't do that the sncf does not publish ticket sales publicly they do publish this table of station usage figures on their website but it's a bit of a mess first of all the numbers are based partly on ticket sales but also extrapolations calculations and surveys so the data is pretty muddy and secondly it includes several stations that aren't even open if you sort the table by the least used the first 50 rows have got zero passengers so honestly my research was beginning to feel a bit like this hike in the end i got the friendly people of french railway twitter on the case but still no one had access to the exact figures and the best thing we could find was a couple of old articles saying that le cabrillo with its 14 passengers a year is the least used station in france now that number doesn't match up with what's on the sncf website so i'm assuming that the journalists got access to more accurate data but i don't know that le cabrillo at the end of the day i realized the only way we'll ever find the one person who knows the true answer is if i go to la caprara post a video on the internet calling it the least use station in france and then wait five minutes for them to post an angry comment telling me where i should have gone instead anyway never mind that because we're now approaching our destination and if this video achieves nothing else then i am quite possibly the first travel youtuber ever to make a hiking montage and then soundtrack it entirely with pedantry next question how do we get to it and here it is the least used station in france officially it's a puandah non-gere a non-staffed stopping point also known as a pong uh i've had to put this back on because legally i'm now in an sncf station which means you have to wear a mask someone might find me i don't know e5 euros you can't mess around with these people it's just the one platform it looks like i reckon that used to be another track there there used to be a passing loop here and that's obviously gone some time ago you got the old station building behind me which seems to be i think it's not it's not abandoned it looks like someone's living there and then someone lives in the farmhouse down there so what facilities are there at le cabrillo well there's a shelter there's a there's onward travel information there is no dot matrix there is no ticket machine there is no bike rack that i can see there is a help point which i haven't tried yet and there's a dog one train 6 49 in the morning one at 2 23 in the afternoon one at 10 past 10 in the evenings on sundays and festivals that's a bit mad and then going in the other direction 7 37 in the morning or 10 past seven at night so basically two trains in each direction every day which actually feels like quite a lot for a least used station but one of them is an insanely early time in the morning presumably for all the people who want to get to their jobs in civil rights that sounds like fun milo they have a bit of a viaduct going on there i think for anyone who's a fan of cheese so this section of the line is subsidized by the regional government and must be hugely subsidized uh because i've paid one euro for my trip back from here so uh yeah if you want a really cheap trip on a train and some nice scenery why not come to li cabrillo [Music] right i'm having to film this on my phone now because my camera battery ran out um but trains should be here in about five minutes i hope uh i really hope so that's about it from le cabrillo the least used station in the whole of france let me know if you enjoyed this video and join me next week when i will be starting my new series tuttle where i will be trying to visit all 3029 stations in france if you'd like to visit le cabrillo or ride further on the beautiful albright line try and get here as soon as you can when international travel is safe again because the whole route is currently under serious threat of closure to passengers there is a campaign to try and save it and there's a petition you can sign it's all in french i'm afraid but basically it sounds like it's a classic example of a rural line where the service has been gradually run down with trains running at weird times of the day and if it doesn't get investment soon then the towns and villages around here will lose their connection completely and it could spell the end for trains running over the garage viaduct i'll put a link to the petition in the description below meanwhile thank you very much to jeff and vicky from all the stations for being the inspiration behind this video and frankly one of the inspirations behind me making videos in the first place check out the all the stations channel for their epic adventures visiting every station in the uk and ireland while jeff has a separate series of videos where he goes around the uk visiting the least used station in every county i'll put the playlists on screen in a moment all that remains is for me to say thank you very much for watching and i will see you soon

Channel: The Tim Traveller

Views: 514,891

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Id: h4zLFfN9dkM

Length: 11min 52sec (712 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 07 2021