More railway photography! Yes, it wouldn't be one of our trips without some.
On the drive to the accommodation, we'd driven on an autoroute which paralleled a single-track, electrified railway, and spotted all manner of branch lines, industrial sidings, and interesting bridges. Towards the end of the holiday a free morning saw me (Ben), Father-in-Law, and Elder Child, heading down the valley with the cameras on an astonishingly lovely, sunny day.
Outskirts of Aigueblanche, and this looked a good bet (not least because, as is common for France, there was no lineside fencing).
Lovely old lattice bridge.
The only problem was that SNCF have no equivalent of Real Time Trains, and what I could find online suggested the train was in fact a replacement bus.
About five minutes after taking this shot (of a nearby, very modelle-able bus shelter), a train roared past. Just after I'd packed the camera into the car. Sods law.
A quick drive up the valley towards the next spot, some sidings we'd seen from the Autoroute, and on a whim we stopped at the pretty, well-kept station of Notre Dame de Briancon.
I have a thing for French railway architecture, and so got loads of reference pics.
Having thought we'd missed the train, a loud clanging of the level crossing announced the arrival of a push-pull service, hauled by this electric loco. Typically, it's got graffiti on it, but that seems to be standard for France.
Off it goes, towards Moutiers. Consulting the timetable showed a bewildering variety of trains, some of which ran but with caveats such as, basically, 'only on summer Thursdays, but not in summer, on days after a full moon, after a unicorn has jumped over a rainbow, and only if a little girl in compartment ten has remembered to bring more than three teddy bears, and the train is painted gold'. After some Enigma-Machine-level decoding of the timetable, we worked out there wouldn't be another train for either two hours or possibly a week, so set off up the valley to the sidings.
Clearly, despite how it looked from the road, there hadn't been a train in a while to the factory sidings.
Apparently France has had the same downturn on rail freight traffic as the UK; I've heard since the road haulage lobby have become as powerful in France as Britain, which might explain it.
However, in a rare display of common sense compared to Britain, the sidings have been left intact, awaiting a possible re-opening. No doubt in the UK the scrap metal faeries would have had all this away, and the land had about 400 houses built on it.
Lizard basking in the ballast.
What had thrown us, into expecting the sidings to be in use, was this. A lovely yellow Locotractuer parked up on a rake of tanker wagons in the factory. Either they tarmacked over the level crossing before remembering they'd left a train behind (not impossible, British Railways did it at Silloth when that line closed), or the factory still uses a train of their own for internal use. There wasn't anyone around except some builders, and my schoolboy French isn't up to explaining the concept of industrial railway enthusiasm, so we didn't go into the works to photograph it closer.
We headed for home, along the back roads, when we spotted this lovely little station. Aigueblanche is a terrifically run-down, slightly tatty town, with a station to match. By this point I'd decided I wanted to do a model of a French station, so nipping up to this one with the camera was a must.
Despite the well-turfed platform and station house in private ownership, this seems to be an open station. I can't quite picture Eurostars stopping here, but it has signage, lights, and a timetable board.
We were running low on time by now, so after a few pics, we headed off. So only one train seen (technically two with that locotractuer), but loads of inspiration for model-making...
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