Marc Seguin
in the museum
The replica of the Marc Seguin locomotive of 1829 was exhibited during the summer of 2017, a sign of the passion that drives the world of railways. This exceptional piece of equipment required years of painstaking work led by Gaston Monier and his organisation. The locomotive was built on the basis of original drawings, and has the particularity of moving. It is fully functional and enables visitors to measure the technological progress made from the early years of steam to the TGV.
One event may
hide another
The model room is the high point of the tour, and leaves no visitor indifferent. This 1:87 model was built by André Ullrich in the late 1970s and was first displayed in the entrance hall of the Crédit Mutuel Sainte-Marie, where that models aficionado was employed. The room in the Cité du Train which is now devoted to it became its permanent home in 2002.
While trains are important, everybody is delighted by the details of this world in itself, halfway between reality and imagination. With a bustling fair, a pumpkin patch, a mysterious castle and a football pitch where miniature players bump into a group of monks, this creation is technical, yet tells stories. Outside the Quais de l’Histoire, the Mini Express of Alsace, imagined in 2014, continues to go round. If it is raining, the little rubber-tyred train, a favourite character of the museum, is always ready for you.
A shared
history
Even though space is unfortunately not unlimited, the museum continues to acquire new items to display. The latest of these was the Mauzin 214 track geometry car, which came in June 2019. But recent years were particularly devoted to restoration. The Langres rack railway, affectionately known as the “Crem’Zouille” had been restored a few years earlier in 2016, and was already in the Quais de l’Histoire. Then came the turn of the USI and UIC coaches displayed in the Panorama Ferroviaire after restoration by the SNCF Workshop of Périgueux. In September 2019, the European Heritage Days marked the return of the Decauville railcar (1945) after it was restored by the Quatre-Mares workshop in Sotteville-lès-Rouen, as was its forerunner the Buddicom a little before the French Railways Museum was founded. In 2021, the active participation of SNCF employees in the exhibition devoted to high-speed trains once again demonstrated that the love for the museum and its exhibits is going to last.
En voiture
Simone!
What if you had a chance to travel through time on exceptional trains? That was the wager taken on in 2018 by the Cité du Train and Versatile, a company based a few kilometres away from the museum in Hochstatt. A dive into the great railways epic that is made possibly by a number of colourful characters. For the first time in its history, the museum opened the doors of its most prestigious trains to great delight of visitors. “It was so frustrating to not be allowed to climb on. At the same time, these are historic coaches that would not withstand the traffic of many thousand visitors. By organising visits with small groups of a dozen people, we could create a small cocoon. But we had to go further than existing guided tours. So we brought in some characters.” say Claudine Lengert and Julien Prodorutti, who were behind the project. Funny, sincere, unusual and above all exciting theatrical visits that you can find every year, from April to August. J.P.
The Train of
innovation
2018 was a major date in the history of the SNCF. For its 80th anniversary celebrations, the company emphasised the wealth of its human and engineering heritage. On that occasion, the Train of Innovation started off on a travelling show to 12 locations across France. Inside, a futuristic setting retraced the eight decades of the SNCF, with a focus on the themes of memory and innovation. Some models, usually kept in the museum, went along with the selected works to meet the people of France. Ending its tour at the Cité du Train, the Train of Innovation was a huge success. From railways museum to museum railway!
Setting the stage
for high-speed trains
2021. The TGV turned 40. This was a major event for SNCF, and generally for the world of transport. Designed by the stage and museum design firms La Fabrique Créative and Azimuse, the rearrangement of the last track of the visit of the Cité du Train pays homage to that chapter of the history of railways. Displaying the RTG and the 61 traction unit, the new space devoted to high-speed trains addresses the technical, geographical, social and decoration issues of such transport. This redesigned museum space, which was produced behind the scenes in 2020-2021, is a concentrate of know-how. Archivists, stage designers, graphics designers, photographers, track layers and drivers all brought together their skills to give concrete form to the predictions of André Ségalat, who had said this at the opening of the museum in 1971: “I would like to tell the founders of the French Railways Museum to leave room for expansion: the railways are only just starting out on their journey! ”
50 years
in posters
What better way to end this retrospective than to take a look at the drawings collected by the museum?
There are 50 years of promotional posters. From the gouache by Albert Brenet to the screen prints of the Mulhouse group 2920g, each period has its own style and vision of the collections. Trains appear as geometrical shapes or sketches, but always an inexhaustible source of inspiration. The 50 years poster, created by the firms Landor & Fitch and Vuxe, shows the Buddicom, the oldest locomotive in the museum and generally in Europe. The figure of Michel Doerr, the founder of the museum can be recognised easily. Looking in the distance or in the future, he possibly might not have thought that five decades later, the museum would celebrate its heritage and railways adventure, which was only beginning.
Our children
and grandchildren…
“I am sure that our children and grandchildren will continue to add new pieces. Some of these are in use in our systems, others are still on the drawing board, but they will come some day to the Railways Museum.” This statement by Jean-Mathis Horrenberger, taken from the television programme Expression of 29 December 1982, has lost none of its relevance. While the museum celebrates its 50th anniversary in 2021, the year is also that of 40 years of high-speed trains in France.
The display of the orange TGV in the new museum space is thus a symbol. But as Michel Doerr said in the second part of the video, railways are more than machines. He believed that “when one is steeped in humanism, the human element that is represented by the tradition of the railwayman’s trade [is very much part of the story]”. The French Railways Museum already has a past, a present and undoubtedly a future, bearing a whole section of the individual and collective memory of the railways.