A Railway Fossil - The Paris Ligne d'Auteil

This blog is one in my series of 101 Things You Can't Do Any More, a collection of nostalgic reminiscences of things, once taken completely for granted, that are no longer possible.

In about 1983, I attended a meeting about starting a European consortium to encourage the adoption of open network standards. It went nowhere, like most such initiatives. The company behind it was the now-defunct French manufacturer Bull, so naturally the meeting was in Paris, at the huge skyscraper hotel at the Porte Maillot (currently the Hyatt Regency though it was something different back then).

I’d flown there directly from Boston, so I was jetlagged. A consequence of jetlag was that I woke up very early on the morning of the meeting. and that is where the 101 Things start. I noticed that there was a mainline railway station in a cutting just beside the hotel, so at 6am or so I headed down there, to the station of Neuilly - Porte Maillot. This served a strange attenuated line, the Ligne d'Auteuil, which ran for just a few kilometres starting from the Porte d’Auteuil in the south, to Pont Cardinet in the north. It was a tiny remnant of the former Petite Ceinture which, as the name suggests, once circled Paris at about the same distance as the modern Periphérique. Pont Cardinet is the first station on the suburban lines out of the Gare St Lazare, a place of no particular significance, in Paris's 17th arrondissement.

The 1929 train at the Porte d'Auteuil terminus

Soon a train arrived, and we were instantly plunged fifty years into the past. Instead of a modern stainless steel suburban train, this was a relic from 1920s. It was dark green, and from the weathering and accumulated grime looked like it hadn’t been painted or cleaned since it was built in 1929. Best of all was the smell, an overwhelming mixture of hot brakes, hot electrical parts, and general oldness. I watched a few people get on and off, taking this ancient train for granted as part of their daily commute. I stayed on the platform to watch a few more come and go in each direction on their 8 kilometre shuttle.

Everyone has regrets in life. There are big ones, that were or would have been life-changing. And there are small ones, that you look back on and think “Why on Earth didn't I do that?” I don’t really have any big regrets, but I have quite a list of small ones. And this train is high on that list. Why on earth did I just stand there on the platform, instead of buying myself a ticket and undertaking the journey on this magnificent example of living history?

Just recently I stayed in Paris near Pont Cardinet, taking advantage of the new Metro Line 14 to get there. It all came back to me, the miasma of that vintage train penetrating my sleepy jetlag in the early morning. And that sinking feeling afterwards, why didn’t I do it?

There was no possibility of returning to do it later. Just a few months after my trip, the line was closed permanently. It was in a good cause. Most of the line was to be reused as part of Paris’s brand new urban railway system, the RER. But this ancient relic of a past time was gone forever. When it reopened three years later as an extension to RER Line C, it was used by shiny new stainless steel trains travelling across all of Paris and northwards to the outer suburbs.

As for me, I returned to my meeting. I have no idea what happened, since my jetlag meant that I snoozed all the way through it, with occasional interruptions from my colleague’s elbow. I’m pretty sure I didn’t miss anything that mattered. The group was called SPAG, and despite my deep involvement in the OSI standards, I don’t remember it ever doing a single thing. It seems to have slowly faded away as the OSI initiative lost momentum in the late 1980s. And I still regret not taking that old, smelly green train.

101 Things You Can't Do Any More

There are lots of books and articles with titles along the lines of 101 things to do (implicitly, before you die) - places to visit, music to listen to, movies to see. My personal take on that theme is a little different. There are lots of things that were once taken for granted, but now you can't do them any more. There are spectacular ones, like flying on Concorde. Then there are smaller, more personal ones, like riding on a trolleybus in London.

I doubt that I'll ever manage to come up with 101 of these things, especially since I'm only including ones that I've done - or sometimes just nearly done - myself. But I'll keep adding to this list as I think of them.

• Flying on Concorde (but I haven't written that one yet)
• Visiting East Berlin and East Germany
• Using a Telex machine
• Using the best of all mechanical calculators, the Olivetti Divisumma
• Travelling on Paris's living railway fossil, the Ligne d'Auteuil
• A traditional holiday at the English seaside
• Crossing the English Channel on the hovercraft

Some of these you can still do - but in an un-authentic, re-created way. For example, you can most certainly ride on a train hauled by a steam locomotive. But it will be on a preserved railway somewhere, just a few miles there-and-back, done for its own sake. It is nothing like an eagerly-awaited trip for a summer holiday, or a here-we-go-again business trip.

This was brilliantly captured by Thomas Hardy, in The Return of the Native:

"A traditional pastime is to be distinguished from a mere revival in no more striking feature than in this, that while in the revival all is excitement and fervour, the survival is carried on with a stolidity and absence of stir which sets one wondering why a thing that is done so perfunctorily should be kept up at all. Like Balaam and other unwilling prophets, the agents seem moved by an inner compulsion to say and do their allotted parts whether they will or no. This unweeting manner of performance is the true ring by which, in this refurbishing age, a fossilized survival may be known from a spurious reproduction."