French Influence

[Focalplane]

Now I am retired I have the opportunity to visit places I always had on my "to do" list.  This weekend I was in Deauville and was able to photograph the station terminus building:

 

 

Strictly speaking the station is just in nearby Trouville but was built to serve the wealthy Parisians who made Deauville their summer home in the late 19th Century.

 

The station building was used as the basis for the Pointe Noire terminus of the Chemin de Fer Congo Ocean.  Built around 1930 at great cost to human life, the COCF connects the Congo capital, Brazzaville with the country's second city and port at Pointe Noire.

 

 

The terminus building is an impressive structure, particularly back in 2006 when it received a thorough cleaning and painting.  Someone once told me they thought it looked like a Tesco supermarket but I had learned otherwise - Deauville was its inspiration.  Two places could not be more un-alike, except that is, for their railways stations!

 

I have seen other examples of exported French architecture on my travels and will add photos when I can find them and scan them.  Anyone else got any examples?

[Joseph_Pestell]

I don't think that those two have much in common architecturally at all. The African one draws more on Basque architecture if anything.

 

Morocco has/had pure PLM buildings in places.

[Joseph_Pestell]

Trouville-Deauville features at the end of a French film in which the rather lovely Veronique Genest played a young terrorist. She later became better known in a TV detective series, Julie Lescaut.

[Focalplane]

I don't think that those two have much in common architecturally at all. The African one draws more on Basque architecture if anything.

 

Morocco has/had pure PLM buildings in places.

 

That's what my better half said!  However, that is what I have read and there are some similarities, IMHO.

 

My days working in Tunisia often came up with level crossing keeper's houses that were straight out of rural France.  No surprise there.

[Focalplane]

Trouville-Deauville features at the end of a French film in which the rather lovely Veronique Genest played a young terrorist. She later became better known in a TV detective series, Julie Lescaut.

And my other reason for visiting Deauville was to see the boardwalk where they filmed two sequences from Un Homme et Une Femme.  It's still there!  Though the man and the dog were not present and the Ford Mustang was somewhere else, driving on the board walk being illegal nowadays.  Trains leaving Deauville for Paris were filmed for this movie but no recognizable station building is in the frame.

[Pacific231G]

Trouville-Deauville features at the end of a French film in which the rather lovely Veronique Genest played a young terrorist. She later became better known in a TV detective series, Julie Lescaut.

It also appeared fairly extensively in "Murder on the Links" one of the ITV Poirot episodes with David Suchet filmed in 1995 and first shown in February 1996. My avatar was the loco involved though it was rather amusing to see it pull in, apparently from Paris,  with a tender full to the brim with water. It was also supposedly set in 1936 but the loco, coaches and railway staff were apparently already working for SNCF two years before it was formed. Never mind, the shots of an Etat Pacific running through the French countryside made a few anachronisms forgiveable.

 

Trouville-Deaville was quite an interesting station as it was a reversing junction for the line to Dives-Cabourg and in the summer, until comparatively recently, though coaches came off the Rapides from Paris and reversed out to Cabourg.

 

For a couple of years From 1923 the Wagons Lits company even ran a "Deauville-Express" that offered a Wagon Restaurant and saloons but also Voitures Lits. I'll leave it to your imagination why some first class passengers required private rooms for two people on a daytime train that required far less than three hours to complete its journey! In 1927 they ran the Deaville-Pullman-Express made up from between four and five "Anglais" Pullman cars and presumably rather more respectable than its predecessor (as befitted a train that I assume was built in Birmingham)  It's usual make up was two "couplages" (Pullman saloon and Pullman kitchen) with a fifth saloon to strengthen it when required.  I've yet to dscover the composition of its predecessor.

 

As well as the notably airy and open passenger platforms, there also used to be a couple of lines that crossed the station forecourt from the adjoining goods yard to serve the quays and small marine industries on the little peninsula of land between Trouville and Deauville.

 

Electrification has made it all rather less atmospheric.

[Focalplane]

Daytime sleeping cars! There is the story, probably true, that wealthy Parisians kept their mistresses in Trouville, their families staying in Deauville. Sounds like Providence, Rhode Island, all over again.

[Pacific231G]

Daytime sleeping cars! There is the story, probably true, that wealthy Parisians kept their mistresses in Trouville, their families staying in Deauville. Sounds like Providence, Rhode Island, all over again.

There were some fascinating shots in a recent French television documentary on the 1936 Front Populaire. They introduced things like the forty hour week and two weeks (12 days) of paid holidays for the first time to France's notoriously downtrodden industrial workers and, aided by special train fares,  many took a proper holiday for the first time in their lives.

 

The shots showed them on the extra trains laid on for the new passengers arriving at Trouville-Deauville and of course being looked down upon by their "betters". After the war, most of the social measures introduced by the PF were reinstated and my impression was that Deauville remained to some extent the fashionable resort created by the Duc de Morny and there is still a contrast between the two towns probably greater than that between say Brighton and Hove. .

[Focalplane]

Here is a link to the link!

 

https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gare_de_Trouville_-_Deauville

[JeffP]

There are parallels here with the very prosperous resort of Le Touquet, and it's neighbour, Etaples, which has the station.

 

Some of the homes in Le Touquet have to be seen to be believed.

[Edwin_m]

Vague memories of a day trip to Paris from Trouville-Deauville on a Turbotrain, aged (me) about 9. 

 

Troville-Deauville station to me looks very Metroland.  Compare Stanmore and Watford Met

[Pacific231G]

Though it was probably based on a cross between Deauville and Le Touquet, if you read Ian Fleming's Casino Royale carefully you can place Royale les Eaux roughly where  the real resort of Cayeux-Brighton is or a bit futher down the coast before the cliffs ruse up at Ault. It's been the subject of endless speculation on the 007 fan sites (most of which place it as Le Treport) I'm surprised nobody has ever used it as a layout theme.  Cayeux is probably too close to the main line to warrant a line like that to Deauville though it is the terminus of a metre gauge line from Noyelles. 

The same town is described in On her Majety's Secret Service but with a different geography.

 

Interesting that when he wrote Casino Royale in the 1950s the north coast of France between Dieppe and the Somme  would still have seemed rather glamorous and exotic to British readers.

[Focalplane]

France's influence on railway architecture includes examples from other African ex-colonies.  This shot of the terminus at Dakar, Senegal, must include a hint or two of a station somewhere in France?  Though the use of glazed tiles would not be typical.

 

 

I was forbidden from taking any other photos for "security reasons".  This was in the year 2000.

[EddieB]

While Dakar has many buildings in the grand style, such that parts of it could be taken for a city in France, I don't think the main station falls into that category.  To my perspective it owes more to tropical influence than French style.

 

 

 

Likewise Thiès, the hub of the Senegalese railway system.

 

 

Photos from 1990.  No permits, but I managed to get a "pass" from security.

[Joseph_Pestell]

Though it was probably based on a cross between Deauville and Le Touquet, if you read Ian Fleming's Casino Royale carefully you can place Royale les Eaux roughly where  the real resort of Cayeux-Brighton is or a bit futher down the coast before the cliffs ruse up at Ault. It's been the subject of endless speculation on the 007 fan sites (most of which place it as Le Treport) I'm surprised nobody has ever used it as a layout theme.  Cayeux is probably too close to the main line to warrant a line like that to Deauville though it is the terminus of a metre gauge line from Noyelles. 

The same town is described in On her Majety's Secret Service but with a different geography.

 

Interesting that when he wrote Casino Royale in the 1950s the north coast of France between Dieppe and the Somme  would still have seemed rather glamorous and exotic to British readers.

But if it "les Eaux", that is a casino in a spa town not at a seaside resort.

 

Note: For those not familiar with French gambling laws, until recently casinos could only be set up at coastal resorts or spa towns.

[Pacific231G]

But if it "les Eaux", that is a casino in a spa town not at a seaside resort.

 

Note: For those not familiar with French gambling laws, until recently casinos could only be set up at coastal resorts or spa towns.

I know that but according to Ian Fleming, at the end of the nineteenth century Royale was a once fashionable seaside resort based on a small fishing village with its Vieux Port that was struggling but failing to compete with Le Touquet until a natural spring was "discovered" in the hills behind the town (so it's not Cayeux)  The resort reinvented itself as the seaside spa of  Royale-les-Eaux while also marketing "l'Eau Royale" - particularly beneficial to the liver apparently- in torpedo shaped bottles all over France (and presumably shipping it out by rail!) After falling on hard times again and with its mineral water eclipsed by Vichy, Perrier and Vitel, the by now very dilapidated Casino and the town's two grand hotels were revived by a syndicate in 1950. 

 

In Casino Royale Fleming does hint at a rail connection and it would be interesting to consider what sort of terminus a resort with that history would have had. It sounds less industrialised than Le Treport which had some importance as a port but larger than the three resorts served by the CF du Baie de Somme or St. Valery en Caux. Fleming hints at a town comparable with Trouville but with more in the way of leafy promenades and boulevards. 

 

I'm not aware of any seaside spas in France but I suppose it would be possible

[Joseph_Pestell]

I'm not that familiar with Fleming's oeuvre other than the films which are not that faithful, I understand, to the books.

 

Royale is just not a credible name for a town.

[Pacific231G]

I'm not that familiar with Fleming's oeuvre other than the films which are not that faithful, I understand, to the books.

 

Royale is just not a credible name for a town.

Neither is St. Georges Motel but it's the peculiar name of a real village in Normandy a few kilometres north of Dreux! and I can't find any other meaning in French to the word Motel than its familiar and modern one. We of course have Westward Ho! which is totally improbable and what could be more artificial than Stella-Plage, Cayeux-Brighton or Le Touquet-Paris Plage. Le Touquet wasn't even a hamlet before it was developed as an upmarket resort as close as possible to Paris.

 

Granted the original resort would probably have been called La Royale or possibly la Plage-Royale (there's one of those in Cannes) rather than just Royale but I had no trouble finding Chappelle-Royale, Corme-Royal and Chatteroy-le-Royal amongst French communes and Royale-les-Eaux strikes me as a splendid name for a belle époque resort trying to appeal to an upmarket clientele.

 

In any case setting a layout in a place from fiction has a fairly distinguished pedigree ranging from several Borchesters to Clochemerle and the fictional account provides a ready made back story with a lot of useful detail.

[Fat Controller]

Neither is St. Georges Motel but it's the peculiar name of a real village in Normandy a few kilometres north of Dreux! and I can't find any other meaning in French to the word Motel than its familiar and modern one. We of course have Westward Ho! which is totally improbable and what could be more artificial than Stella-Plage, Cayeux-Brighton or Le Touquet-Paris Plage. Le Touquet wasn't even a hamlet before it was developed as an upmarket resort as close as possible to Paris.

 

Granted the original resort would probably have been called La Royale or possibly la Plage-Royale (there's one of those in Cannes) rather than just Royale but I had no trouble finding Chappelle-Royale, Corme-Royal and Chatteroy-le-Royal amongst French communes and Royale-les-Eaux strikes me as a splendid name for a belle époque resort trying to appeal to an upmarket clientele.

 

In any case setting a layout in a place from fiction has a fairly distinguished pedigree ranging from several Borchesters to Clochemerle and the fictional account provides a ready made back story with a lot of useful detail.

Montreuil-sur-Mer; 'reuil' being an older spelling for 'royale', I believe. It's not on the sea anymore..

[sharris]

Did anyone else look at the Gare de Trouville-Deauville and think it wouldn't have looked out of place with a Harvester sign outside?

[£1.38]

Montreuil-sur-Mer; 'reuil' being an older spelling for 'royale', I believe. It's not on the sea anymore..

Montreal has a similar royal connection

[Joseph_Pestell]

Neither is St. Georges Motel but it's the peculiar name of a real village in Normandy a few kilometres north of Dreux! and I can't find any other meaning in French to the word Motel than its familiar and modern one. We of course have Westward Ho! which is totally improbable and what could be more artificial than Stella-Plage, Cayeux-Brighton or Le Touquet-Paris Plage. Le Touquet wasn't even a hamlet before it was developed as an upmarket resort as close as possible to Paris.

 

Granted the original resort would probably have been called La Royale or possibly la Plage-Royale (there's one of those in Cannes) rather than just Royale but I had no trouble finding Chappelle-Royale, Corme-Royal and Chatteroy-le-Royal amongst French communes and Royale-les-Eaux strikes me as a splendid name for a belle époque resort trying to appeal to an upmarket clientele.

 

In any case setting a layout in a place from fiction has a fairly distinguished pedigree ranging from several Borchesters to Clochemerle and the fictional account provides a ready made back story with a lot of useful detail.

As someone who has a great liking for Nord rolling stock, I can see that it is a tempting idea. If they had built a branch to Le Touquet, the station building would doubtless have been a marvel of 20s architecture.