Great Western Coffee Shop

Here's yet another variation on the "where (or what) is this?" picture quiz. When I looked in my digital shoe box, I found lots of holiday snaps from France, some with railway subjects. So here's a selection of those, and a few extras not quite fitting that definition that have sneaked in too. Usual rules apply: one live suggestion or success each for today please.

1
(http://www.passenger.chat/stuving/AQ1.jpg)

2
(http://www.passenger.chat/stuving/AQ2.jpg)

3  Monaco-Monte-Carlo  - JontyMort
(http://www.passenger.chat/stuving/AQ3.jpg)

4
(http://www.passenger.chat/stuving/AQ4.jpg)

5
(http://www.passenger.chat/stuving/AQ5.jpg)

6  Caen, TVR (Calvados)  - Oxonhutch
(http://www.passenger.chat/stuving/AQ6.jpg)

7
(http://www.passenger.chat/stuving/AQ7.jpg)

8
(http://www.passenger.chat/stuving/AQ8.jpg)

9
(http://www.passenger.chat/stuving/AQ9.jpg)

10  Le Crotoy, Chemin de Fer de la Baie da la Somme (Somme)  - eightonedee
(http://www.passenger.chat/stuving/AQ10.jpg)

11
(http://www.passenger.chat/stuving/AQ11.jpg)

12  Nantes, gare SNCF (Loire-Atlantique)  - eightonedee
(http://www.passenger.chat/stuving/AQ12.jpg)

6: Caen Guided Light Transit replaced last year

Yes, the single-rail ?tram? track of the TVR days before it closed. Replaced by proper trams over almost the same routes within less than two years (2017-2109). Of course the route clearance work had already been done for the TVR.

Possibly the only one I might guess with a little hope of success - is 10 the Baie de Somme railway?

Is 3 the Lyon metro?

No - definitely a mainline station.

Yes. I hadn't planned going to see this, but came across it running along parallel to the road. So I followed it to see where it went, which is the terminus at Le Crotoy (Somme).

I know the whole forum has been pretty slow today, but still ... if no-one objects I'll add a few hints in a little while.

I'm just waiting to find out number 8. I have a strange weakness for the 'grandiose brutalist' style of architecture!

I think many have paused for a few deep breaths after the changes / events of the last few days ... many of might have guessed / speculated at some of the changes that might happen, but not at the detail nor the days they would happen.    It always feels quiet when you are waiting for quiz post guesses too.

Is no. 7 the Canal du Midi??

Et porquouis jour vingt trois, et le mos de Janvier

"Jan" is a mistake - thinking too hard about something else at the time. But well spotted - and nice to see someone's awake!

In the Roman Catholic church, Advent starts on the fourth Sunday before Christmas day, and is thus of variable length. This year it started on the 29th November, so today is its 23rd day.

I find it quite ironic, most prescient of Stuving, that all these places photographed are now in the Forbidden Zone!

No - not really close, either.

Waiting for divine inspiration? Asked a friend? Or just a slow-moving memory, like mine?

We could add a poll to "Ask the Audience"

Here are a few (not too helpful at this early stage) hints:

2. taken in 2013
4. sauce for the Rosbif?
5. had to be rebuilt after 1945
7. you can only see two or three locks, but ?
12. rebuilt station opened last month
two, I know, are places a lot of people have driven through - or perhaps more likely past.
And these are all recent - no older than 2012 - so may have been mentioned on the forum.

3, as I said is a main line station - here's a picture to prove it (for those who are logged on and can see it):

Thello is a pretty big clue. Wikipedia tells me it runs trains from France into Italy, but with very limited number of station stops in France.
So for No.3 I'll guess Dijon-Ville.

I'm a bit puzzled by that suggestion - Dijon is very much open air, and this one is very much not.

Stuving - I think I can work out no 12 as well - is a waiver of the only one in the first day available?

Yes, this time I think so.

You could think of this quiz as like using Zoom for a business meeting abroad, but for a holiday - and without those annoying heads blocking the view.

Thanks Stuving - 12 is (I think) Nantes station (the "TER Pays de Loire" on the train was the clue!)

Yes - in 2018 it was getting its new "transfer deck" a la Reading, but called a mezzanine. And it was made of beams craned into place, hence the through tracks underneath being closed.

Stylistically, it's nothing like NR and Grimshaw's rather plain box.
(https://www.sncf.com/sites/default/files/styles/crop_diaporama_edito/public/2020-11/Nantes_009-25%C2%A9Willy.Berre_.jpg?h=d512f76b&itok=B-RXVxqO)
Among the hits for "gare nantes video", this one (https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwjj5pPT3t_tAhVCr3EKHaYLD24QtwIwBnoECAcQAg&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DAqSY5r6fmak&usg=AOvVaw2NUAFqnT4ASl3DJ0NySCbY) has least distracting waffle. And I note that the unions are complaining about how much space is taken up by retail units ...

A pedant writes: 3 is indeed an SNCF mainline station, but it isn?t in France. Monaco.

That's right - though pedantically speaking it's Monaco-Monte-Carlo. Its marginal unFrenchness is covered by my carefully-worded let-out about some not meeting that definition. I can't think of any similar station in a tunnel, though some are underground (or under a station building).

It's said they rebuilt the line in tunnel to free up valuable land for building very expensive flats on (there being no other kind in Monaco). But hardly any of the line was open to the sky before that, so it must have been more a case of building blocks of flats with underground car parks (and swimming pools?) rather than without.

Most of the workers in Monaco live in Nice, and with tourists as well the railway link gets very busy. My mid-morning train from Nice was full and standing tidily only, and left half an hour late. By then the next train was due to leave, and on checking the SNCF online compensation system I found my train had been renumbered as that second train. So it was on time - and the earlier one was cancelled, but fortunately had no passengers! I wasn't impressed. The crowd pictured didn't all fit on the train when it arrived - and it was a 12-car of double-deckers. I trusted the CIS and got a more inhabitalble one ten minutes later.

This line has one of the worst performance records in France. SNCF have been having a long-running "difference of views" with the region (PACA), currently subject to a kind of truce.

We went on that line when we spent a long weekend in Menton a few years ago, flying to Nice. And very pleasant too. The views are lovely - except in Monaco.

The tunnel section was built in two stages, and certainly freed up some land. Wiki has an explanation and a map.

I have never ceased to be amazed at what a win world with so many countries we have. It's a richness which means that as soon as we leave these shores we're onto thin layers of knowledge (found it with Irish quizzes too!).     None of us (I hope!) has been to France in the last few days (though I know at least one member lives there rather just visiting so I pulled up a little map.  Click below if you want to see it bigger / remind yourself of the rail network there ...  which looks like it may help with some of the pictures - at least giving places to try.

(http://www.wellho.net/pix/rff-map.jpg) (http://www.wellho.net/pix/rff-map.jpg)

Huge thanks to Stuving for hosting this quiz ... I'm sure more answers will come in / more clues and solutions by Christmas.

I'm darned sure I've seen something like that before..  But Google Image Search came up with Hunerford and a picture in an Estate Agent's house details showing the canal nearby, and Tineye reports


I am lost for choice between Normandy and Carcassone ... with a strong probability of being told that both are wrong.

Off to sleep ...

As we are in "French mode" I was watching the film The Greengage Summer with Kenneth Moore.

In one of the first scenes which I must have missed or it might have been removed
was 28 Boulevard de Verdun, B?ziers, H?rault, France in Southern France near Montpelier

Would any one know the village train station the family arrived at?
most of the location shots are in and around the reims and marne area.

Right, a bit more nudging. I've bunged the hints into a thermocycler and this came out:

Three are places marked on Graham's map, and three are too small.

1. You should have just been able to read "musee", and perhaps "petite gare". There are several of these that have been repurposed, some as houses and the one in Saint-Gilles-(Croix-de-Vie) as a community/arts centre. You can see the family likeness in this old picture:
(http://stgil.e-monsite.com/medias/album/2-14-jpg)

2. Obviously a bike race, and it is in fact "Le Tour". Below is another picture of that bizarre event from just down the hill a bit earlier.

4. That canal is often credited to Napoleon, as its building started on his watch. But it was planned earlier, and finished later. So, not one of the earlier ones, then.

8 and 9 have several things in common, but neither is Arras.

The others I have posted about over the last few years - for example why the two lines in no. 4 meet like that, or what happened a few years before the station in 5 was destroyed in 1945.

Here's an update - remaining questions.    About half of the French places have been recognised ... now "Open Season" ...

Numbers 2 and 7 are not linked to railways - they were put in as other ways to provide an "in", based on things a number of people are interested in. But to no avail; it seems that cycle racing and canals in France are outwith the scope of those interests. So I might as well answer those:

No. 2: Stage 10 of the 2013 tour passed through Cancale just before finishing in St Malo on 9 July. The surrounding tomfoolery and crowds fortunately didn't prevent me getting my ferry that evening, in fact the roads were very quiet; were all the locals hiding away from it?

This was the second time the TdF had visited me on holiday; in 2011 the first day was from Fromentine, via le Gois (tidal causeway) and along the by-pass of Saint-Gilles-Croix-de-Vie so I could walk there. Of course, being so close to the start, the race wasn't interesting at all.

Cancale itself is an odd place - just a little fishing port (population under 5,000) now specialising in oysters, but it has around 40 restaurants!

No. 7: The actual site is at Hede-Bazouges in Ille-et-Vilaine - which really is obscure. But it's also called ?les onze ecluses?, ten of which are in a straight line - not that you can see them all from anywhere at ground level. Part of the Canal d'Ille-et-Rance, running from Rennes to Dinard (or St Malo); a sort of Ushant by-pass.

No. 4 is not far away, though not in the region of Brittany.

For no. 1 I'm not so much looking for the place as the railway it served.

Here's a picture of No. 5 after the old station was wrecked on 17th Jan 1945:
(https://img.over-blog-kiwi.com/1/56/71/42/20200203/ob_d8f1d7_accident-de-train-2.jpg)
It's not entirely beyond the bounds of possibility that someone could recognise the type of  locomotive!

Nos. 8 and 9 are, as I suggested, on the route from Calais (and not far from the autoroute either). And no. 8 is one of the few buildings named after its architect.

No. 11: I visited last year, and commented on then and at other times there's been disruption at Paris-Montparnasse.

OK - here goes

5 is St Valery en Caux, which when I visited in 2001 did not actually have a train service - I caught a bus from in front of the station to Dieppe to pick up a hire car. I posted about the accident a while back but cannot find this by searching. A troop train hauled by a WD locomotive overran the end of the track at this terminus with some considerable loss of life - mostly US troops I think.

11 is I think Orleans

Quite so, Saint-Valery-en-Caux (Seine-Maritime); I was there in 2017 as part of a battlefields trip. The line closed to passengers in 1994, allegedly so it could be used for delivery of aggregate for the construction of the A29 - though no doubt the lack of passengers had something to do with it.

The train suffered brake failure on the downhill section into St Valery, and arrived at an estimated 80 km/hr. The 2000 GIs were in 40 goods wagons, many sitting at the open sliding doors with the legs outside, leading to a lot of amputations as well as 100 deaths. One version I read says the loco was brought over from Britain due to the loss of so much French stock, but if goods trains were not then continuously braked, any incompatibility would not have mattered. And stuff like that did happen a lot during the war.

No. 11 is not Orleans, old or new.

No. 11 -- is it St Pierre des Corps, near Tours?

No - but the train in the picture could quite possibly call there..

Is 11 Le Mans?

No - and I had that down as an easier one, being topical; it was in the news only this month, having been closed for 15 days by a very unusual accident! But in the posts on that, I didn't in fact mention that it had been repurposed for intensive growing of scaffolding. Anyway, here's another picture of it from last year.

Would that be a reference to the collapsed <I>poutre</I> at Paris-Austerlitz?

Yes, Austerlitz - the forgotten terminus of Paris - with most of its local trains now RERs under the floor, and no TGV routes using it.

The forest of scaffolding was for a renovation of the roof, due to finish in 2019 but still going on. It was suspended in September 2019 (coincidentally, just before I was there) due to excessive levels of lead in the air - the glazing framework was being stripped of old paint, and the protective measures didn't work well enough. No doubt the reaction to this was stronger due to the lead pollution following the Notre Dame fire. So you know what to expect when work on Bristol Temple Meads's gets going - try not to breathe too much! Work should have finished, but the delays mean it's still going on, with SNCF still publishing monthly reports on measured lead levels.

That renovation work also did something to the concourse areas, but his was only part of a much bigger revamp, covering the "public realm" aspects as well, fitting in with a plan for the quartier as a whole. Here's a picture of the train shed as planned - note how the intrusive bridge for the Metro has become hardly noticeable.
(https://static.actu.fr/uploads/2020/12/projet-austerlitz-la-halle-lightbox.jpg)
This second phase was launched this year, and another for Paris-Nord has also just been launched. This is linked to the rugby union world cup in 2023 and the Olympics in 2024, and no doubt we'll see those deadlines become an important feature in reports of progress (or its lack) on infrastructure projects in Paris.

Of the questions left, no. 4 is Chateaubriant (Loire-Atlantique, gare SNCF), where the tram-trains from Nantes meet the DMUs from Rennes face to face and glower to each other across the gap. While I did comment on this odd arrangement in 2014 (with the same picture), and since, it was a harder one.

Presumably something about the rebuilt line makes it unfit for non-tram-trains to use, though it isn't clear what - it looks to be standard "railway", with barriered level crossings and using the original trackbed and stations.

Except (as noted before) in Nantes, where the line runs beside an off-road tram line and a zombie good-only railway line. There, three crossings of all four tracks are standard tram crossings. But the Nantes end of the line does link to SNCF tracks in the station!

Duh - of course - the Beef clue.  I too got "Dijon" into my head - then "Horseradish" before getting stuck on "Wellington" which - clearly - it was NOT.

How do we stand now?   Just one or two left?  It always surprises me how difficult members find quizzes that take us beyond Great Britain - even as close as Northern Ireland let alone to our European neighbours. 

I'm going to admit I haven't got a Scooby on any of them,
but will say my first impression of No 6 was, What a gauge! makes Brunel's Broad gauge look small.  ;D ;D



Scooby, Scooby Doo, CLUE

Yes. No. 1 does say it's a "petite gare" - in this context that's on the Tramways de la Vendee: metre gauge light railways running along roads (mostly) from the Loire down to Les Sables d'Olonne. This one happens to be at l'Ile d'Olonne, perhaps surviving because it's in a back street of a village, but they were all very similar. The key was "what network" (to put into Google).

The really weird thing about this system it that was built so late - opening in 1923-25, when other rural lines were already being closed down as motor buses and lorries took over. This was part of the levelling-up "Plan Freycinet" that led to 20,000 km of light railways by 1928, both tramways (i.e. largely on the roads) and separated routes, and at various gauges. (A short history (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voie_ferr%C3%A9e_d%27int%C3%A9r%C3%AAt_local) in English is on Wikipedia).

These secondary railways (voies ferr?es d'int?r?t local) covered much of France, and in some places (notably Brittany) got going before 1900 and formed substantial networks. In such hilly areas roads couldn't be used, so it was more a case of narrow gauge being cheaper, and completing the mainline network (the subsidy helped too, of course).  In the (very flat) coastal Vendee, it looks more like a rearguard action by the state railways to keep out competition from buses, and mainly joined the ends of their lines.

There are hardly any pictures of these "little trains" (many ruder names were also used) running on streets, perhaps because they only ran three or four times a day (plus a few goods trains). These two were taken from the same point (but the train one is earlier), so you'll just have to move the train mentally.
(http://stgil.e-monsite.com/medias/album/a-30.jpg)
(http://stgil.e-monsite.com/medias/album/a-29.jpg)
These pictures are from Remy and Marlene Wiart's collection of postcards here (http://stgil.e-monsite.com/album/le-trajet-du-petit-train/2/), and there are further (unlinkable) pictures here (http://roland.arzul.pagesperso-orange.fr/affermes/tv/index.htm) too. (I'm also now finding more sites about such trains elsewhere in France, some with maps and pictures.)

Some judicious enlargement of the image reveals the name "Abbeville" on the gable end of the station building in picture 9 - so "Abbeville" for that one.

I think this leaves that ugly tower (no 8)) - the brutalist architecture reminds me of Le Havre, but that great source of quiz answers, Google reveals that Auguste Perret, the architect responsible for a number of buildings there gave his name to a tall building in Amiens - which looks like this one.

[for some reason the smiley/emoji with dark glasses appears for the number eight in this post!]

If you select "Additional options - don't use Smileys" you can replace 8) with 8) .   
If you want to be  selective as I just did, write 8[I][/I]) to come up with 8) rather than 8)

Yes, those were the two towns that I'm sure many of us have passed by or even gone through.

No. 8 is the Tour Perret seen over the back of Amiens station. I used to think this the ugliest building in Europe, but that's too harsh. But it does look to me like the work of an off-colour SHRDLU*.

However it, the station, and the surrounding square still look very drab and clunky to me, compared to his stuff at Le Havre - which I quite like (the centre, at least). Still, it's all listed as of historic importance. The square's now filled with a "bambouseraie" called the Octopus's Garden and a huge canopy (just visible in the photo), so you can barely see it any more! I used to look like this:
(https://en.geneanet.org/public/img/gallery/pictures/cartes_postales/c8/7723289/large.jpg)

And No. 9 is Abbeville station - pretty eh? And quite unlike the town's post-war reconstruction style. That I think is quite successful: mostly rather domestic with just the hotel de ville allowed to show off a bit. None of the free pictures on line show is in context, so I had to dig out an old print of my own (1998).

Abbeville, unlike many other towns in northern France, was destroyed by the Luftwaffe (20/5/1940).  Planning its reconstruction started during the war, and involved several architects so it's not associated with a single name like Perret's.

* Very much narrowcasting, that comment.