Trains - France: books - rail routes and stations

French Metre Gauge Survivors : Scenic Journeys Through Rural France

France was once dissected by a huge eclectic array of Metre Gauge Railways. Only a few examples remain, some of which are only relatively short sections of the former systems.

These are now largely attuned to the tourist industry. However these survivors do amply portray the lines of yesteryear, as they traverse the beautiful and contrasting French countryside.

Product details

Arrêt sur images 1950-1980 - par Jacques Defrance

This book retraces "in pictures" the career of Jacques Defrance, industrial designer at CEM (Cie Electro-Mécanique), better known as the creator of works on SNCF motor equipment, published since 1968 by La Vie du Rail.
For forty-seven years, always accompanied by his faithful camera bodies, Jacques Defrance scoured the French railway network in search of unusual images or new things.

The authors have set out to unearth some 300 unpublished photos from the 9,000 contained in the railway collection. Mainly in black and white, more timidly in colour, they show the sites, machines and eras that Jacques Defrance was fond of, such as the French metric railways, the Breton network, the Corrèze PO, the Canari, the Saint-Gervais, Paris and its suburbs, the end of steam, that of the Bastille line or the arrival of new equipment.

Product details

Paysages ferroviaires français

This album of railway photographs is entirely devoted to the unpublished collection of a man that train enthusiasts know well. An aviation officer working for the Air France company; Guy Rannou was an excellent photographer.
Passionate about the railway world, he crisscrossed France for fifty years to capture snapshots of trains crossing the French landscapes, particularly on secondary lines.

Product details

Les trains de nos campagnes - Années 1960 - Lignes à voie étroite

In the aftermath of the Second World War, secondary railways comprised more than 8,000 kilometres of tracks, most of them narrow gauge, covered by steam trains and railcars serving rural areas neglected by the "main" railway.

But by 1960, these trains had almost all disappeared, victims of the rapid motorisation of the countryside and competition from roads.
The author travelled through most of the surviving networks at that time. His photographs, all unpublished, are a valuable testimony to the changes of that decade.

Product details

La France des lignes oubliées - Ces 80 ans qui modifièrent le visage du train en France

At its peak, in the late 1920s, the main French rail network had more than 42,000 kilometers of lines open to passenger traffic, it is less than 30,000 today. This formidable network, which irrigated France even in its most remote corners, shrank like shagreen leather from the 1930s and even more thirty years later, during the great wave of closures.
The priority given to the development of the automobile sounded the death knell for the small lines crisscrossed by two-tone omnibuses. The stations closed, the rails disappeared under wild vegetation, the land lost its train.

This book recounts in detail the inexorable contraction of the French rail network before the partial takeover of traffic by the Regions. Images, maps, figures, testimonies to know everything about these lines that fell asleep in pain on French soil.

Product details

Il y a 50 ans... Paris-Bastille

December 14, 1969... 50 years ago, the Bastille station disappeared. The line to Boissy-Saint-Léger, now operated by the RATP from the new Nation station, became the first regional express network, the RER A. The Reuilly, Bel-Air and Saint-Mandé stations have disappeared from the local landscape, as have the old steam locomotives and their "wagon green" cars that dominated Paris on the famous Daumesnil viaduct. On this wintery December day, 110 years went up in smoke...

This work is the memory of this endearing line, with its popular environment, made up of artisans, small businesses, modest buildings...
The author has brought together numerous images, documents, unpublished plans, highlighting the atmosphere of the stations on the Vincennes line, whose soul resided in its old-fashioned and timeless style, inviting the reader to combine the past with the present.

Please note: This book is very different from "Paris, la ligne de Vincennes", another book by the author, published in 2006. It only deals with the part from Paris-Bastille to Boissy-Saint-Léger on the one hand essentially during the decade of the 1960s, that is to say as this line was 50 years ago when it disappeared on December 13, 1969.
On the other hand, of the approximately 320 images, documents and objects presented, approximately 300 are unpublished iconography! As for the form of the book, it has nothing to do with the previous one. Finally, it presents and emphasizes the environment of the stations and the Bastille line.

Product details

La Chapelle 1846-2013 : Des machines et des hommes

This book tells the long and rich history of the La Chapelle depot, opened in the mid-19th century by the Compagnie du chemin de fer du Nord, at the foot of the Butte Montmartre, and which closed its doors more than a century and a half later.
This depot shone with its know-how applied to steam locomotives, then to speed service thanks to the famous "big wheels". At the controls, the heroes of the steam era: men with faces blackened with soot, devoted to "their" locomotives.

La Chapelle was then converted to modern traction (diesel, electric) for "speed" traffic and the suburbs. It was finally on January 25, 2013 that the Paris depot was officially closed. Ground Control in 2015, then Grand Train in 2016 are the final episodes of its history.
A railway saga immortalized in this work with exceptional iconography, a tribute to a duo specific to the railway: machines and men.

Product details