The Chemin de Fer de la Mure re-opens

I saw a piece in the Daily Telegraph recently to the effect that the CF de La Mure has re-opened this year. It shut in 2010 after serious landslide damage, so this is good news. The line is in the southern French Alps and while I once visited it in passing in 1998, I have not managed to ride on it.

If you have not heard of it, the line is 30 km long, metre gauge, a sort of cross between the Woodhead route and an 009 rabbit layout: DC overhead, operated by vintage B0-Bo electrics and plenty of wriggles and twists in the mountains including 4km of tunnels. I must organise an expedition!

 

I travelled on this line in the early / mid-1990s; magnificently scenic journey. Had been unaware of its 2010 misfortune: I tend to be out of touch nowadays, with rail events abroad. If I'm right, it's France's only remaining metre-gauge overhead-wire electric line of any length or substance -- I learn that it was opened in the 1880s, and electrified in 1903. "Genuine" public passenger services ended in 1950: the line continued in its primary role of hauling anthracite from the mines, until 1988 -- late enough for it to be rescued and converted to a tourist / heritage operation.

A small curiosity: this line gets a mention -- about as brief, "glancing", and uninformative as possible -- in Bryan Morgan's classic 1955 work concerning Continental minor railways and other things, The End of the Line. He writes thus, "It is time, then, to forget a strange goods line which may yet be working at La Mure..." Morgan was a quirky guy, tending to take dislikes -- often not easily explicable -- to a variety of things. He wasn't very keen on this particular corner of France: with this, plus with his way in the book, of 95% disregarding of any lines which didn't have public passenger service at the time of publication -- it would seem highly probable that he never visited the line, even in its passenger days pre-1950: just refers to it in a fleeting and tantalising "aside".