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JOURNEYS
OF DISCOVERY
by Tim Leedham
It
was the late nineties when we started going to France
on family holidays to stay with friends who had bought
an old merchant’s house in a medieval village
in the Aveyron. Sometimes we travelled by the overnight
car-carrying train from Calais to Narbonne but I never
took much notice of the passing railway scene, except
for the green 141R parked in the depot at Toulouse which
triggered memories of an SNCF rover ticket tour in 1965,
the days of working steam.
Sometimes we lunched at l’Hôtel Modern in
the nearest town, St Affrique (below) , and across the
road was an ancient sign saying in English “No
Night Trains”. Alas there weren’t any day
trains either and the railway viaduct was used as short
cut for road traffic. Over my langoustine and rosé
I wondered where the line had come from and gone to.
Truth turned out stranger than fiction.
Occasionally we made a day’s foray to the seaside
and on the way the car traversed a level crossing in
the centre of a village called St Rome-de-Cernon. In
that instant my mind registered overhead wires suspended
from rusty hoops the like of which I had never seen
in six decades of railway observation. My addled brain
recollected a similar vision next to the new A75 south
of Clermont Ferrand but it often had a steeper gradient
than the highway so I must have been confused by long
hours at the wheel. Enquiring from my host I was informed
the structure was obsolete but there was a weekly goods
train conveying sheep’s cheese from Roquefort
to Paris. How wrong is it possible to be ?
In the evening I pulled out a Michelin map of Languedoc-Roussillon
to review our road journey and in a moment of distraction
noticed a thin black discontinuous twisty line that
according to the legend was a railway. I doubted this
because the official tourist map at Rodez airport where
Ryanair lands showed no railways whatsoever so I considered
the road map was wrong or had merely recorded an industrial
relic. But on the off chance I sent an e-mail to the
tourist office in Millau (where the local McDonald’s
had just been burnt down) and politely asked in French
how I might find out about train times. They gave me
the telephone number of la gare SNCF but I was not brave
enough to call it. My host thought it was only a bus
depot (la gare routière being sensibly adjacent
but this is a foreign concept to the Anglo-Saxon mind).
Then inspiration struck – a search on Google,
and the first light of a new dawn.
I had never heard of Cook’s Continental Railway
Timetable but discovered from the internet I could get
a train from Paris to Rodez, changing at Brive. By chance
business took me to Paris the day before our regular
family holiday in Aveyron so at 5pm I duly presented
myself to the ticket office at the gare de l’Austerlitz
and requested a single to Brive. At 6am next morning
I requested a single to Rodez and was surprised to be
told Correspondance Capdenac. Change trains –
on what was already a rural branch line ? Shades of
Melton Constable, Evercreech or Riccarton ! In the dark
of that June morning I found myself aboard an air-conditioned
streamlined blue-and-grey twin unit with half-a-dozen
fellow souls. We stopped at many wayside halts some
of which, to my utter astonishment, were manned and
signalled. Even more astonishing was the interchange
at Capdenac where I boarded a single unit spaceship
for an hour’s run through gorge and moor to Rodez.
I was flabbergasted lines like this still existed let
alone flourished.
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