From 2008 to 2012 a friend and I spent at least 2 - 3 times per week obsessively 'running track' in the Paris metro.
It's definitely one of the most interesting systems in the world, with a lot of hidden secrets. Despite years of systematic exploration, and having walked the length of the entire system, we were still finding artefacts.
For the interested, in my opinion the most complete writeups of the system was written by my exploring partner.
Even looking back at those photos today takes me on a huge nostalgia trip.
The article very accurately outlines our trepidation of first plunges into the system, and our original photos shot on film, and finally progressing to a more polished style as we got more experience.
There are very interesting stories in the graffiti, representing generations of visits, and 'following' certain people, noticing where they'd been and not been.
For those who don't want to read the entire article, here's one part which you shouldn't skip: F3 the page for "getting caught by security and police".
Does anyone know if the system is still as accessible as it was in 2012? I know that at least in northern France and Belgium this type of exploration has become a lot more difficult due to more cameras and more police/security awareness.
One of the weirdest was shooting photos when a track side door opened, a man in a nice suit walked up to us, didn't say a word, smiled and shook our hands, each in turn, in total silence.
He then revealed himself to be the chief engineer of the line 1, was happy to let us hang out and watch the trains with him, and said in parting.. oh, I really should get around to fixing that ingress point of yours..
Or a worker we bumped into who said he knew we weren't painters because we didn't throw rocks at him, and thanked us kindly.
The most surprisingly was stumbling upon a 1930s train, the Sprague Thompson in mint condition, hiding in a section of metro that we'd overlooked for years...
I find it facinating that in a growing population that large places like Paris have stations that became disused. But that seems to be the case upon many large underground networks that have been around long enough and in London the list is not short: https://tfl.gov.uk/corporate/about-tfl/culture-and-heritage/...
Though that does not include stations part built and then never completed of which there are a fair few for London, unsure about Paris but I would imagine be some instances of part built or intended stations that never got finished.
Indeed I had a look at seems at least two got built and never saw use - https://www.renfe-sncf.com/rw-en/blog/destinations/paris/vis...
The parent article does a good job at explaining the whys and hows.
For the stations that where actually open at some point, it was mainly a matter of optimization: new hubs being built, profitability, etc. The end of WWII has been the turning point for most them.
Porte des Lilas was a prototype station repurposed for shooting movies in a controlled environment.
Haxo was part of a failed project to connect two lines. It was never officially opened so we, locals, don't really consider it as a station.
The buff between Place d'Italie and Corvisart has never been a station. It's more of a curiosity than anything.
Not mentioned in the article are the former end-station of line 5 at Gare du Nord, now a training ground for metro drivers, Arsenal on line 5, Porte Maillot on line 1, and Molitor, which was never even connected to the surface.
I am not sure how popular the ghost stations of the métro, the prohibited sections of the catacombs, and the "petite ceinture" are with today's teens but they made Paris a gigantic interconnected playground back in the 80s/90s.
I was always curious: the Sprague/s were left virgin for so many years. Was it because they hadn't been discovered by writers, or because they were considered untouchable for reasons of historical importance. Obviously the scene has all types, and both scenarios seem as unlikely as each other.. can you elaborate ?
Edit: "Sprague" or Sprague Thompson is rolling stock dating back to 1908. There are one or two hidden very well in the system, with one still in mint, serviceable condition.
There are still quite a few Sprague cars preserved and maintained by various entities, some of them are even inserted in the traffic for special occasions like "Les journées du Patrimoine" during which the RATP ans other organisations show off a lot of very interesting and usually hidden stuff.
That particular train of Spragues, the one that is covered with paint, has been stored in many places over the years, without a clear intent as to its future, like the BOA prototype. The first time I saw it was in the Vaugirard yard, which wasn't exactly a walk-in, so that made it a hard target compared to the regular trains. When they moved it in the connexion between lines 7 and 10 it became a much easier target and a go-to place for just about everyone.
I'm afraid the RATP doesn't care much about that specific train.
As for types, yes, we have all of them. Very few of us care about historical importance but it might actually be more of an attractor than a detractor for those who do.
I was referring specifically to the Sprague that was used in the Journée de la Patrimoine (which was sadly banned post 2010 I believe). It was well hidden, but then got trashed a few times with 'low effort' painters (throwing of paint over it, or quick chrome throwups as opposed to decent panels)
Couldn't understand if this specific one was "spared" for so long because it was well hidden, or because most painters considered it "too nice" to paint (or pointless, as it was rarely in service..)
The other ones (Monceau, etc) were obviously well and truly rinsed.
There's a few nice examples of preserved rolling stock in the RATP's "secret warehouse", but they only kept the head and trashed the wagons.
Vaugirard was definitely a nice yard, hard until we found a nicely hidden trapdoor-in-a-wall behind a 03..
That specific one was spared because it was well hidden, as soon as it became an easier target it had to be painted. Spragues, ghost stations, historical monuments, natural landmarks, Russian space shuttles… nothing is "too nice".
Vaugirard was more of a "monte-en-l'air" business for some of us ;-).
Oh man, the piece on the Buran is simply horrible. We managed to slip in just before COVID lockdown, somewhat lucky to have seen it before it got rinsed..
And sure, les ateliers seemed to be affairs of bras-honneur ..
Yes for London the WW2 period sure did change the landscape in many ways and I recall being supprised that it wasn't until 2015 that London's population had finally caught up with level it had in 1939. That alone really did highlight how some things can be impacting far wider than we appreciate.
Likewise from you.. our first jaunt in the Berlin metro led us to a train laid up near the Opera junction with cops and dogs waiting inside for us to paint, and were thoroughly confused when we didn't..
We usually did our stints at the western side yards, S-Bahn as well. Yorkstrasse, Schöneberg, and all over the city in the end. So many stories of meeting strange people when painting, most of them friendly and not "anti-grafitti", more the other way around, some really helpful people letting you into their homes after being chased by the cops once again.
I know of some impressive homeless shelters in old tunnels, not only homeless people went there, but musicans and skateboarders too.
The cops never got us, they were always lagging in shape and motivation. One night we stumbled into a yard which was already bombed by the 1UP guys at that time, we ended up doing end to ends with them and doing throwups til 10am.
The energy and dedication in those moments i've never found again. Still, i don't really miss laying in some wet gravel for hours full of paranoia and fear of getting caught and beat up. Sadly even finding an archive of photos documenting all this is not really possible, there were too many people involved being too chaotic in the end. A great part is lost and lives only in our memories.
You know… scouting, trespassing, chasing something or someone, being chased, the sounds, the smells, the "tick, tick, tick" dogs make while stamping on floor of a metro car, etc. There are specifics, of course, but the baseline is the same everywhere I have been.
Yep, chase the toys away from crossing the latest Poet62 piece because they don't know better. There were real feuds between writer gangs, serious stuff til blood was shed and noses bled.
Even worse sometimes.
Some unexperienced kids were killed by just imitating the
train-surfers, without any prep or such.
I saw a guy falling four stories from a rooftop down into some bushes, i thought he died. He lived with some broken rips and a hard rash from the safety rope he had handled wrong.
I should write this all down in some ordered manner some day...
Some groups were a bit too territorial, yes, but that wasn't generally the case. You would chase other writers to steal their supply, or because they would have painted over your own stuff or were guilty of some other kind of disrespect. You would chase non-writers, like track workers or passengers to have time to finish your piece or take pictures in the yard. Etc.
Someone else in the thread mentioned throwing rocks, it was actually a shared hobby and a universal one at that.
Yes, I think I know the place. I had a fun adventure there, once, that taught me the importance of checking the batteries _before_ crawling in.
There was another one in the XVeme that I used to visit bi-monthly.
I wasn't much of a "cataphile" myself, but spending some times down there was a very common occupation in the 80s/90s. You could meet all kinds of people, down there.
As of last year, it was straight-forward to transition between the official park and the rest of the line on the north side of the park. Might need a shovel at the south side, but then you're quickly on active RATP property, with better access points across a few crossovers. Also a formalized access point somewhere near Montreuil where some old furniture was placed in just the right spot from street level.
Good place for berries and figs at the right time.
Paris Métro stations are much closer together than London ones, and in some cases it makes no sense to keep open a low-traffic station that's just 100m from another, due to the cost of staffing them and the delay of a stop there to the entire line.
I remember walking between two stops of the same line within Châtelet-Les Halles (presumably current line 4), but maybe such a conglomerate is unusual even for Paris.
Châtelet-Les Halles is the biggest and busiest Métro and RER station in Paris and that's why line 4 stops twice there (at Châtelet then at Les Halles).
New York also has a few abandoned stations, most often (as in a lot of these Parisian stations) because they were so close to other stations that there wasn't much point in operating both -- doubly so after platforms on the stations still in use were lengthened to accommodate longer trains. (There are also a bunch of former connections to elevated lines that no longer exist.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_closed_New_York_City_S...
I also read once that it made sense to build stations that weren’t yet required for the system because they were already close by digging the tunnels for other stations and they were doing some future capacity planning that ended up getting abandoned. The station near the Broadway G stop comes to mind, which you can access from the north side of the southbound G platform not too far up the tunnel. A while back some artists did an (illegal) show in it.
Somewhat unrelated, under the Bank of Norway head office in Oslo, there is a piece of tunnel that was never used. There were two alternative routes being considered for a tunnel under Oslo, and when they built a new bank over one of the routes, they built the tunnel just in case.
In the end, the other route was selected. The tunnel was initially used as a firing range for the national bank guards, and later transformed to a parking garage.
There are a bunch of partially completed stations (or expansion provisions for future stations) which were intended for the "IND Second System" -- a massive set of projects that got killed off by the Great Depression.
(The beginning of one of those lines actually got built and put into service, in the form of a one-station spur line branching off Hoyt-Schermerhorn in Brooklyn, and going to Court Street, where the line now stops. It was originally intended to continue into Manhattan and become the Second Avenue Line. Instead, it was operated for a time as a shuttle, then discontinued. Court St. Station is now the main site of the Transit Museum, which may reopen one of these days. There's now a rump Second Avenue Line recently put into service on the Upper East Side -- three stops of it -- but construction of the rest isn't fully funded, it's not planned to reach lower Manhattan for a few more decades, and there are no active plans to continue it into Brooklyn.)
The Renfe stations are still there, but rather uninteresting - empty concrete cut and cover affairs. The Barcelona metro does have a few abandoned stations. They also have the mosos police, which wage violent war against graffers, making 'innocent exploration' a high stakes game.
The Wikipedia list says why each London Underground station was closed.
Several are now only for suburban trains. Others were closed when replacing lifts with escalators meant entrances had to be moved, and were now too close to the next station.
You know what? I'm sometimes wondering why I can't see any picture of something I've experienced while I traveled by train from Bonn, Germany to Madrid, Spain to visit my best buddy, who moved away to there with his parents. For my summer holidays, about 1980 or so. Alone. For two days on the trains! Yay!
What I will never forget was while I had to take the Metro in Paris to switch from one terminal station to another, the Metro rode trough some subterran depot/switching yard, which was a large rectangular hall, at least several 100 meters long, almost 100 wide, and 10s of meters high. Dark. Except for the signals, warning-lights, whatever in orange, white, yellow, red, green, blue lining all tracks and the ramps going up and down into and out of it. I'll never forget that, because it was so unexpected. Almost like the glide-path indicators during night approaching large airports, as seen from the cockpit. But below the ground. And not old and grimy at all. Modern, light concrete. Really very 'spacy'.
Maybe because it would be unwise to go there, because not abandoned? Anyways, at the times I rode through there it was empty, no other trains at all. Just the blank tracks and switches reflecting all those colored lights and signals.
I can think of one such place, a three tracks layup on the so-called "Boucle des Invalides". It is used everyday to park trains from the line 13 between rush hours but I don't remember it being used for normal traffic. Maybe back when Invalides was the terminus of line 13, but that would put us back to circa 75-76.
As for UE worthiness, I can certainly imagine someone doing long exposure shots down there, and capture the kind of impression you got, but it probably lacks the mystique of ghost stations and secret places you can feel in the parent article.
Thank You for looking/thinking. I watched the video, but that wasn't in it, not even close. As to the UE worthiness, I don't know. It really 'flashed' me at the time. No long exposure needed. Just the movement.
Had to be Sunday, late morning/early noon because i took a night train from Bonn/Cologne with sleeper cars(didn't slee at all!) over Belgium, where I only remember Liège and Charleroi, and nothing else until Paris. Can't remember exactly anymore how much time I wasted on foot in the city. Had to catch the train to Madrid over Hendaye/Irun in something like late noon, 14:xx.
So that was the timeframe. I remember feeling hot from schlepping two suitcases for several kilometers, crisscrossing Paris while the weather was good. Had to be June/July, otherwise no summer holidays :-)
Imagine sitting almost alone in the cab, on the right side. Driving trough some tunnel, suddenly going down noticably, which opens to some sort of ramp on the right side, where you can see a large open hall with almost no columns, dozens of tracks, at least several football fields long. On the opposite side also a ramp, also descending to the other side of the field of tracks. The ramps illuminated by orange lights spaced maybe 2 to 3 meters apart, on the ground, besides the tracks.
In the 'field' between the dozen of parallel tracks elevated ways of metal mesh(gridiron?). Crossing the field of tracks on both ends and in the middle diagonal tracks and switches, making something like three X-es over that. Almost all metal surfaces shiny, reflecting. All the colored signals which were also there, mostly on the ground besides the tracks, some on poles between the tracks, some on the walls where the ramps come down. You moving from the left side, through the middle X to the right side, maybe for half a minute to short of a minute. All the lights and signals changing their reflections.
Turning around, looking to the left side. Seeing the same play of reflections there. Another tunnel exiting from the middle of the field between the two end ramps. All rather dark if not for the signals and orange lights lining all tracks. Thinking... "Whoa! What was that?!" while moving up the ramp on the right side into another tunnel.
So that had to be some deep place, because at least the ramps on both ends on both sides descended down into it for at least two floors, and it had one tunnel in the middle of one end which I couldn't see much of, but it seemed level, no grade.
Anyways, I think I'll search for Paris Metro subterran infrastructure/depot/switching yard, or something like that.
Das lässt mir keine Ruhe!
(deepl.com) Ça ne me laissera pas un instant de répit !
That gives me no peace!
Well, the only facilities with that many tracks are workshops, of which only a few are underground and physically separated from the main line and thus very unlikely to accept passenger traffic as they are all dead ends.
From the looks of it, you arrived at Gare du Nord and departed from Gare d'Austerlitz. The best option would have been to take line 4 at Gare du Nord and switch to line 10 at Odéon until the terminus at Gare d'Austerlitz. There is nothing interesting on the first leg beside the staircase at Cité. The second leg gets more interesting at Cluny - La Sorbonne, where the two tracks become three, and right after Maubert - Mutualité, where the two tracks split to make way for a third track to go under them. That part is mentioned in the parent article as "two-level crotch". There are other interesting places on the same line, like the "triangle" between Porte d'Auteuil, Michel-Ange Molitor, and the Auteuil workshop but they are in the other direction. Another thing to note is that the tunnels of line 10 are painted in white, which makes it look cleaner than other lines.
I can't tell anymore. I didn't even take the Metro initially because according to the city maps/plans I had, I thought I would just walk. Then I got lost and tired with two suitcases after walking through some busisness district with tall high-rises and colored glass facades(blue, green, bronze/golden, darkgray) and given up. I wanted to see the Eiffel-Tower, but didn't. That made me angry and feel stupid at the times :-)
However, I needed to catch my train from the other terminus, so I capitulated and took the metro from some other large station which I can't remember anymore. What I do remember was desperation with the ticket machine there with instructions I couldn't really read at the time. Been lucky because there were some tourists there who spoke german, and they helped me
with the thing. (Bling! Multipass!)
Arrived at Gare du Nord, had to go to some other 'Gare' which I also can't remember anymore. But at that time the trains to Spain over Hendaye/Irun departed from there. Which meanwhile changed, I guess.
Always disgusting to see every kind of major building in (Western?) cities smeared by graffiti etc, be it in use (and under constant cleaning) or disused (ghost stations...). There's zero appreciation of the building itself, the expenses for its construction/upkeep or the possibility of putting it into use again, preserving the structure and materials in the best way possible. It's what I always notice first about this type of documentation, it's quite disappointing.
I misread this as Uber X and thought wow they are really taking the ask forgiveness not permission things seriously if I can sign up to break into abandoned subway stations.
I suppose most of these photos used a long exposure, and/or a rushing-by subway for "lighting". There seem to be some small lights for workers/emergency situations, but nothing compared to the lighting of an operational subway station.
It depends on the system.
Paris metro tunnels are constantly lit. It's less than station lighting, but more than enough that you don't need a lamp with you.
It's definitely an oddity, most systems are unlit (Barcelona has entrances lit then nothing, Ukraine, Russia, etc all unlit).
Interestingly, unlit tunnels bring the advantage of if you're seen, the lights are turned on, giving you a clear warning sign to leave.
In the Paris system, you need to actively count the delay between trains to ensure traffic isn't cut. We had one or two encounters where we realised that it had been 4 minutes between trains when they we running on 2 minute intervals..
Two minute intervals! My kingdom for a commute on two minute intervals. The very busiest lines get down to perhaps 6 trains an hour on peak, 3 normally.
Most of the world's busiest systems have at least a line or several which approaches 90 second intervals at peak hours. Moscow, Paris, London, even NYC (and I would have to assume many Asian systems I'm not as familiar with as well). 30-40 trains an hour is the gold standard, but obviously only makes sense if there is enough ridership.
What's the scenario there? They lengthen the headway on the whole line until they catch you or they actually cancel some trains? Why? I'm curious what the operational response is from their side.
Typically they will announce to the PCC (central control) that they sighted people in the tunnels. The next train that comes through the sector will roll at walking speed. If you haven't cleared out by that time and get seen, they stop all traffic on the line, and send in rail police from each side of the tunnel to find you.
It's definitely one of the most interesting systems in the world, with a lot of hidden secrets. Despite years of systematic exploration, and having walked the length of the entire system, we were still finding artefacts.
For the interested, in my opinion the most complete writeups of the system was written by my exploring partner.
http://web.archive.org/web/20130513204844/http://www.sleepyc...