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.