Great Western Coffee Shop

OK - as BNM's fine effort was eliminated in next to no time - here's another attached for bank holiday weekend- where were my wife and I last Sunday?

Devilish image, might it be somewhere on you return from France?

Dawlish?   ::)

It's a difficult one, me thinks. Not Melksham nor Taunton.

Devilish as in very hard!

No - there's nowhere between the station we left in France and the Goring Gap that looks like this! So we are looking at somewhere in France.......

Damn. Two of my guesses gone.....  :'( :'(

OK - so France is a very large country, so I suppose a clue might get someone to have a go....

It's a very large junction, not a railway one.

Has everyone given up - have I like BNM defeated Bradshaw?

I'll give him/anyone else to the end of the week and then reveal all about the tracks into the water..........

Saint Nazaire?.

[serious]Once you get outside the UK (even GB) knowledge drops and questions on "where is this" take far longer and need more clues.   Same thing if you move away from the immediate station.  Good in that it confirms that our knowledge base truly is UK ... sometimes a little frustrating for the original posts; they do help widen our view, though, with a good eventual answer[/serious]

I don't know where it is ... I look at a high res map of the French rail network (https://about-france.com/france-rail-map-hi-res.htm) and guess, starting at Abbeville and Amiens .... Dijon sounded nice, but does not really cut the mustard in this case.  I suspect we need a wide river and a late-built bridge.   

Thanks Graham

Can someone develop that "wide river"  theme..........?

OK - no "bites" - so answer revealed now-

This is at the end of the peninsular at the confluence of the Rivers Rhone and Saone in Lyon (hence non-railway junction clue & encouragement to develop the major river theme).

The mysterious rails disappearing into the river seem to be all that's left of a quayside railway that ran down the peninsular when docks were built in the nineteenth century. It was a built as a river/rail interchange, for (among other traffic) coal traffic from the Loire Coalfield, which I had not heard of prior to investigating this on-line. From old maps, it appears that the works included building a narrow artificial extension to the peninsular to provide a double sided dock with a rail access down the middle.

It seems the final nail in the coffin of the old docks was the building of the A6 Autoroute through the city in about 1960, virtually cutting off the end of the peninsular from the rest of the city. It could have been worse, as the original route supported by the mayor of the time could have carved a path through parts of the historic city to the north. An intervention by the author and historian Andre Malraux, then culture minister, stopped this.

The general area has been the subject of substantial regeneration in the past 15 years or so, with some quite attractive riverside development and a large rather characterless "could be anywhere" shopping centre. Just to the north of this area a striking new "Musee des Confluences" with a landscaped garden area to the south, but the far end has been left as abandoned dock. It seems that the end has subsided, resulted in the view in my picture.

Lyon by the way is worth a visit, and blessed with good varied public transport (metro, 2 tram systems, trolley buses, buses, funicular and even a "vaporetto" water bus). There's a convenient Lyon card you can buy with access to most systems and most of the city's sites.  You can get there from St Pancras on one change of trains at Lille if you want to avoid the Paris Metro with your luggage. Be warned, the Part Dieu station is undergoing a major redevelopment, but still seems to function reasonably well, even if much of the surrounding area looks like a building site, and one arm of the funicular, that leads to the Roman Temples and a good Roman museum is also closed for maintenance.

And don't forget the rack and pinion bit of the metro up to Croix Rousse! That's unique now - at least in the sense that the only other example I've been on (Lausanne) now isn't (it's been derackinated).
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/28/MCL_80_-_Croix-Paquet_-_Lyon_-_2012.JPG/800px-MCL_80_-_Croix-Paquet_-_Lyon_-_2012.JPG)

I did think of the Rhone at Lyon, though not looking that way - but then I thought of lots of other possible places. Now, if that picture had been bigger so you could read the "SNCF" sign on that shed ... it's part of the works at la Mulatière (or Oullins-machines), one of the oldest locomotive building sites in france (1846). Supposedly it's just closed - this month - though visibly there wasn't even rail access into it last November.