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.

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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The authors have set out to unearth some 300 unpublished photos from the 9,000 contained in the railway collection.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.

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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This album of railway photographs is entirely devoted to the unpublished collection of a man that train enthusiasts know well.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.

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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 His photographs, all unpublished, are a valuable testimony to the changes of that decade.

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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.

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