2023-08-14 05:30:03
Weeds on the tracks of the Teil SNCF station (Ardèche) where passenger trains no longer stop, April 15, 2019. NICOLAS GUYONNET / HANS LUCAS / AFP
How much longer will the Ardèche be content to watch the trains go by? Since August 2022, the Occitanie region, chaired by the socialist Carole Delga, has reopened to passenger train traffic the Pont-Saint-Esprit – Avignon – Nîmes section, on the right bank of the Rhône. But once past Pont-Saint-Esprit (Gard), the trains continue their empty journey for 70 kilometers in Ardèche before turning around at Teil. Without stopping at the station. Unlike Occitania, the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region, chaired by Laurent Wauquiez (Les Républicains, LR), has not yet decided to relaunch the train on its portion of the right bank of the Rhône.
At Le Teil, however, the station, a large sad white building that stretches lazily along the large square transformed into a car park, seems to be waiting only for travelers. Right in the city center, it is as if asleep, all shutters closed, like the surrounding cafes and restaurants, where customers are scarce. On the wall, a few CGT stickers, bleached by time, never stop peeling off. This station hasn’t posted train times for a long time.
The Ardèche is the only department in France where no trains run. She has been deprived of it for half a century. It was on a Sunday in August 1973 that the last passenger train on the right bank of the Rhône stopped at Le Teil station. “At the time, the SNCF wanted to reserve this track for freight. It had a strong ambition to develop freight transport”, explains Franck Pallier, spokesperson for the Collective of public transport users in Sud-Ardèche (Cutpsa), an association which has been fighting for years for the return of passenger trains to the right bank. Today, freight is scarce. “There are only about forty freight trains a day in the department compared to 100 to 150 trains twenty years ago”explains one of the few railway workers still active in Teil.
The “feeling that the train was overwhelmed”
In the early 1970s, few protests accompanied the stop decided by the SNCF. From “1968-1969, there was delays and growing disaffection of travellers”, explains Jean-Luc Gibelin, vice-president of the regional council of Occitanie, in charge of transport. It was a time when, according to him, reigned “the feeling that the train was outdated, that it was an idea from before”. Above all, there was the southern motorway, the two sections of which linked Paris to the Mediterranean, passing through Lyon.
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