Disused South West French Rail Lines - Part 6

[MikeR]

Just when you thought that it was safe to put your French Atlas away again, here are a few from Marmande to Bergerac. https://flic.kr/s/aHskQahTND

MikeR

 

[Calthrop]

I find your material posted here on the Forums about abandoned lines in south-west France, most interesting. Feel it to be striking how many station houses / buildings survive today, recognisable as such; and not in ruinous condition, but generally made over to one or another use.

I'm often not familiar -- certainly not nowadays -- with the whereabouts of many of the less-familiar towns referred to; but piecing said info together from available sources, is an interesting exercise. (Locating Gabarret proved a particularly hard nut to crack !) Passenger-withdrawal dates which you gave for the Marmande -- Bergerac line (part in December 1938, part in May 1940) prompt hypothesising to the effect that a good many of those lines which you deal with in your linked-to material, which are ex-SNCF; likely lost their passenger services in the drastic "purge" of such, which accompanied the SNCF's formation in 1938. By my understanding, a large majority of those 1938 closures were passenger-only, with a great deal of the trackage involved, keeping freight services -- often for (sometimes many) decades afterward: which would seem likely to have contributed to the survival today, of so much of the routes and things pertaining to them.

I being a narrow-gauge fan, a bit toward the point of obsession: mention of Bergerac in the link in this post, brings thoughts for me, of the one-time metre-gauge system of the Dordogne departement, from Bergerac northward to Perigueux, splitting there into two branches -- further northward, and north-eastward. This network, run by the big Chemins de Fer Departementaux (CFD) firm which operated independent railways, chiefly metre-gauge, in assorted parts of France; lasted in passenger and freight service until 1949, but was abandoned in toto in that year. It would seem fair to say that France's metre-gauge railways, having been mostly independent of the big railway companies whose merging formed the SNCF; were not affected especially by the 1938 closure programme -- but just faded away piecemeal and in plenty, and went on doing so, from the late 1920s on (some of them getting a few years' reprieve owing to World War II's straitened circumstances).

 

[MikeR]

I am pleased that you enjoying these. I intend adding co-ordinates to the photos so they can be found on Google Earth but that is a later stage. This is only a brief reply as I am in a boat cabin, using a tablet connected to my mobile as a hotspot! I will have "full fat" broadband again in a couple of weeks.

In another thread I made the point that "many of these lines were built primarily for Freight - mainly forestry work - with the passenger traffic almost a by-product. The "Departement" of the Landes is a very sparsely populated area. In 2013, the population density is 43/km2 but in 1931 that density was only 28/km2 - as a comparison, the most sparsely populated County in the UK is Northumberland with a density of 63/km2. The Landes Prefecture (County Town) is Mont de Marsan with a population of circa 31,000.

Another significant but often ignored factor after WW2 was the readily availability of surplus military trucks with advanced mobility and payload capacity and slowly the freight left the rails for the roads. Yet, in many cases, the lines closed to passenger traffic before suspending freight services and descending into complete disuse"

I have a couple of Albums with French Narrow Gauge stock and I will post links when I am back at my PC.

MikeR

 

[Calthrop]

Another significant but often ignored factor after WW2 was the readily availability of surplus military trucks with advanced mobility and payload capacity and slowly the freight left the rails for the roads. Yet, in many cases, the lines closed to passenger traffic before suspending freight services and descending into complete disuse.

Thanks -- all interesting. The above-quoted -- as you say, often unrealised, but "another nail in the coffin".

A similar process, though a generation earlier and figurably, on a lesser scale: is often noted re the UK, in the aftermath of World War I -- many surplus military lorries going cheap, and many folk who had in the course of their service in the armed forces in the war, learnt to drive motor vehicles, taking advantage of that circumstance. Immediate damage done thereby, to the railways' goods traffic: a thing which went on and accelerated, over time. Don't know to what extent the same thing occurred then, in nations of continental Europe which had been belligerents in World War I...?