The time of beautiful stations

The history of stations in France and Lorraine sheds a lot of light on the choices that have been made over the years to organize transport. This history is also a rich collection of anecdotes and architectural references. From 1850 until the 1880s, stations sprang up like mushrooms in Lorraine: 1850 in Pont-à-Mousson, 1851 Bar-le-Duc, Commercy, Forbach, 1852 Toul, Lunéville, 1856 Nancy, 1857 Epinal, 1864 Remiremont, Saint-Dié, Baccarat… and it all happened very quickly. The first railway in the world (in Great Britain) only dates from 1825 and the first passenger station in France (Saint-Lazare) only dates back to 1837. As for the Gare de l’Est, it was built in 1849 , only a few months before the first stations in Lorraine, which were sometimes just barracks and not necessarily the buildings we know today. In Nancy, for example, it will be necessary to wait six years between the first line of railway stopping in Nancy and the current station, finalized in 1856. Certain buildings designed in this 2nd part of the 19th century have also disappeared since. This is the case of Épinal, whose original station was destroyed in 1944 during the fighting between Germans and Americans. It had been inaugurated by Napoleon III in person, in 1857. But when the Emperor arrived, the work was not quite finished and a journalist from l’Illustration recounted: “The railway workers had pulled off part of the circumstance; they had erected, among other decorations, a colossal triumphal arch made up of wheelbarrows whose wheels formed the arch and whose arms rose in the air. The whole was crowned with an immense eagle producing a very original effect. An immense quantity of tools of all kinds had been arranged in various trophies. The Emperor arrived at three o’clock in the afternoon in a blazing sun. After considering all these workers with their scorched faces and their scruffy costumes, he distributed to them a sum of 1,200 francs”. Many of these 19th century stations, located inside cities, were very refined from an architectural point of view and above all, over the years, they have become places of life, meetings, the heart of activities various with restaurants and shops. Today, we are more dealing with “bubble stations” whose halls are emptied of almost everything, where an automatic candy machine fights a duel with a connected ticket machine…