European Railroad Discussion > A Few More Lyonnais Bits Before I Go Home

Tomorrow, I return to the States, but lastly, I thought I'd share some pictures I took yesterday at Gare de Perrache. Perrache is the other of Lyon's two main stations, and it is the original Lyon station. However, at some point in the 1960s, some £¢™∞@#%$ decided to wrecking-ball an entire downtown Lyon neighborhood to build a massive Stalinist extension in front of Perrache's old façade, which ballooned Perrache to the size of a large airport while making it the intercity bus hub for all of Southeastern France and the city bus hub for all of Lyon, as well as incorporating several metro and silkworm-tram lines. (Wow, that was a big sentence. An English teacher would give me a life sentence for that.) Perrache has won every annual World's Ugliest Building Prize (as well as the Hugest Hulking Building and Most Amorphously Shaped, Tentacled Building prizes, all given out by the Nonexistant Architectural Society of Europe) since then. Even the original, old station platform area is smelly and dingy now.

Photo 1: Descending an escalator into the station.

Photo 2: A TER viewed from off the escalator.

Photo 3: Full view on the TER.

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F**k! The pictures are sideways! They were taken with a iPhone, because I forgot my camera, and I know that iPhones can be annoying sometimes. (I remember about 10 of my photos of Grand Central getting flipped upside down here last summer) I'm not sure how to rectify this, so you'll just have to tilt your heads. Sorry.

Photo 4: An interesting wrap on one of the TERs. Check out that disembodied mouth.

Photo 5: A trio of DMU vehicles roll past.

Photo 6: I like the paint scheme on these. Eye-catching, but not over-the-top like the Languedoc-Rousillon trains.

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Photo 7: One of the three small TER units.

Photo 8: TERs of two types passing each other.

Photo 9: The TGV Duplex, aboard which was my Parisian friend arriving for a day to see me in Lyon.

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Photo 10: Window-peeping on the lower level of the TGV Duplex.

Photo 11: The only concession that the Perrache annex was built by humans, not Vulcans, is this interesting wineglass-like piece of art hanging over a bunch of fast-food joints and junk shops. Sorry for the blurry picture.

Photo 12: Remember how I said Perrache was of amorphous shape and tentacled? Well, while the building itself is quite angular, it's shapeless. It consists of several large areas of platforms (for trains, buses, trams, or metros) in random locations, parking garages, long hallways lined with fast-food joints and junk shops, bazillions of staircases leading nowhere, and several long "tentacles" that squiggle out to places such as squares, major streets, and bridges nearby. This is the Place Carnot entrance.

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Thanks for the views Tor-is-god!

The unit in the picture is indeed double decked / duplex, but it is actually not a TGV-Duplex, but one of the numerous newer generation asynchronous powered TGV-Dasyes ("TGV-Daisy"), manufactured in last 10 years years or so. This is a common error as TGV-Duplex, TGV-Dasye, TGV-2N2 and even TGV-RéseauDuplex/TGV-Hybrid are pretty similar before you start looking at the details. More on various TGV types: http://www.4rail.net/fast_tgv1.php

For comparison I included three pictures, so you can easily see the difference (looking from above would though be easiest for this). The first unit is true 200-series "classic" TGV-Duplex, second asynchronous and more powerful 700-series TGV-Dasye and third "all new" 800/47xx TGV-2N2. The third picture taken just recently is by Ilpo Ruissalo. It appears TGV-Duplex sets are next in line due to second midlife refurbishment in a near future, so painting to Carmillion colors will help recognition issues (as long as all new TGV-2N2s keep appearing in the older TGV service silver-blue scheme).

Torisgod Wrote:
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> Photo 9: The TGV Duplex, aboard which was my
> Parisian friend arriving for a day to see me in
> Lyon.

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