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The Parisian metropolitan network has its origins in several decades of debate, more or less bizarre projects and tug of war between the State (which was favourable to the interconnection of large rail networks with large undergrounds) and the administration of the City of Paris (which wanted a small-scale network, serving only the inner city with very close stations, effectively prohibiting access to the rolling stock of the large railway companies). The deterioration of traffic conditions in Paris, the example of foreign capitals and the approach of the 1900 Universal Exhibition convinced the authorities to start construction of the metro. The solution proposed by the Mayor of Paris was finally adopted; the State conceded the design and construction of the work to the City of Paris. After the adoption by the municipal council on 20 April 1896 of the network project of Fulgence Bienvenüe and Edmond Huet, the "metropolitan railway" was declared a public utility by a law that became effective 30 March 1898.

Construction work on the metro on Rue de Rivoli. Photograph by Eugène Trutat kept at the Muséum de Toulouse.

This "railway of local interest" with electric traction, with a reduced loading gauge of 2.40 m (7 ft 10 in) wide and standard gauge, intended for the transport of passengers and their hand luggage, includes six lines:

• A: Porte de Vincennes – Porte Dauphine;
• B: Circular, by the old outer boulevards (Étoile – Nation – Étoile);
• C: Porte Maillot – Ménilmontant;
• D: Porte de Clignancourt – Porte d'Orléans;
• E: Boulevard de Strasbourg (Gare de l'Est) – Pont d'Austerlitz;
• F: Cours de Vincennes – Place d'Italie.

Three lines were planned as a possible option: Place Valhubert – Quai de Conti (on the south bank of the Seine), Place du Palais-Royal – Place du Danube and Auteuil – Place de l'Opéra.

Under an agreement of 27 January 1898 between the City and the Compagnie générale de traction, the network concessionaire, the company agreed to put the first three lines into service within eight years following the declaration of public utility. The first detailed traffic studies suggested swapping the termini of lines A and C: the trains on line A would terminate at Porte Maillot, constituting line 1 of the future network, while those on line C, the future line 3, would terminate at Porte Dauphine. It then also becomes possible to send the trains on the circular line to Porte Dauphine, and this terminus is then considered to be the start of line B.

Work on line 1 began on 4 October 1898, as part of an agreement between the Paris City council and the Compagnie du chemin de fer métropolitain de Paris (CMP), which stipulated that the city would build the network infrastructure (tunnels, stations), with the concessionaire building the superstructure (tracks and access to stations).

From November 1898, the Paris city hall began preparatory work for the construction of the first line of the Paris metropolitan railway: construction of service galleries between the line and the Seine for the evacuation of spoil, relocation of the collector on the rue de Rivoli , and rearrangement of the water pipes. The work on the line itself was carried out in record time: it lasted twenty months and was led by Fulgence Bienvenüe, a road and bridge engineer , and financed by the Paris city hall. The line was divided into eleven lots divided between several companies. Eleven shields (a type of tunnel boring machine ) were built for this work and installed under the roadways, with which approximately 2,500 meters of gallery were dug, including more than 1,500 for the three Champigneul shields which dug from the Place de la Nation (in both directions) and that of the Porte Maillot. In order to reduce the duration of the construction site, however, the construction also makes extensive use of traditional methods of wooded galleries. Open-air work is only used for the construction of certain stations and a very small part of tunnel 10 .

On June 15, 1900, Line 1 was handed over by the Paris City Hall to its operator, the Paris Metropolitan Railway Company, which ran its trains there to test the line and train personnel.

Commissioning

History of Paris panel “ Birth of the Metropolitan ”.

Line 1 at Bastille station , in 1903. The train is hauled by a “Thomson-double” railcar. THEJuly 19, 1900At 1 p.m., the line was opened to the public between Porte Maillot and Porte de Vincennes to connect the various sites of the Universal Exhibition and serve the events of the 1900 Olympic Games in the Bois de Vincennes . It followed the monumental west-east axis in Paris . The line was inaugurated in a very discreet manner, because the Compagnie du chemin de fer métropolitain de Paris wanted a gradual increase in capacity. Only eight stations were finalized and opened at the inauguration, the other ten were gradually opened between August 6 and September 1 , 1900 note 2 . These eighteen stations were entirely built under the supervision of the engineer Fulgence Bienvenüe . Most of them were 75 meters long and their platforms were 4.10 meters wide. The external kiosks were designed by the emblematic architect of art nouveau , Hector Guimard .

The generators of the CMP Bercy factory , commissioned in March 1901. Electricity was supplied, from March 1901, by the large power plant that the CMP had built in the Bercy district , behind its administration building on the Quai de Bercy, where the RATP house, the company's headquarters, is now located. This plant supplied three-phase current at 5,000 volts 25 hertz , with its eighteen boilers with a heating surface of 244 m2 and its three 1,500 kW generator sets . Before the Bercy plant was commissioned, electricity was supplied by the companies Le Triphasé (Asnières -sur-Seine plant ) and the Compagnie générale de traction (Moulineaux plant) R1 .

Parisians were immediately won over by this new means of transport, which allowed substantial time savings in conditions of better comfort than the means of transport available on the surface. It was necessary to quickly increase the frequencies and lengthen the trains. Initially, operations began with a train every ten minutes, then six minutes at peak times. At the end of January 1901, the frequency increased to one train every three minutes, in order to better meet the high demand, without however allowing the line to be decongested, which reached four million cumulative passengers in December 1900 11 , or 130,000 per day.

The original trains had three, then four cars, forming trains 36 metres long. They therefore only occupied half of the station platforms, which were 75 metres long. This all-wooden equipment had only two single- leaf doors per side and the trains ran on axles . The lengthening of the trains, easy to implement, was decided, with the gradual replacement of the M1 motor cars and their 9-metre trailers by “Thomson-double” railcars and new trailers. The latter were equipped with double-leaf doors, improving the flow of exchanges in the station. The composition of the trains reached six, seven and finally eight cars in 1902 , with two motor cars flanking six trailers.

Sprague-Thomson train at Bastille station in 1908. In 1905 , the first axle trailers disappeared completely and gave way to trains composed of seven cars, reduced to six cars in April 1906 with three motor cars flanking three short bogie trailers . In 1908 , the equipment was modified again: new long cars of the 500 Sprague-Thomson series appeared. Their introduction on the line was possible thanks to the slight relocation of the Bastille station with curves of a larger radius allowing the passage of longer cars. The composition increased to five cars, with three motor cars and two trailers.

Nevertheless, the continuous increase in traffic highlighted the lack of capacity of the equipment: a new type of trains appeared during the 1920s , with even longer cars of 13.60 meters and engines with "small boxes", leaving more space for passengers. The five-car trains only had two engines for three trailers.

Extensions to the suburbs THEMarch 24, 1934, a first extension to the suburbs was put into service as far as Château de Vincennes , towards the east, leading to the abandonment of the Porte de Vincennes return loop .

View from the Château de Vincennes terminus station. The Château de Vincennes terminus station , in 2008. After the completion of the first three extra-muros metro extensions to Vincennes , Boulogne-Billancourt and Issy-les-Moulineaux in 1934, the general council of the Seine department decided to build four new extensions, including that of line 1 towards the Pont de Neuilly , measuring 2.3 kilometers, in a westerly direction.

The extension to the Pont de Neuilly faced several difficulties: the terminal loop of the Porte Maillot station had been established in 1900 at a shallow depth, at approximately the same level as the Petite Ceinture line . It was therefore essential to reroute the line at the start of the return loop in order to lower the tunnel below the Petite Ceinture, and to build a new Porte Maillot station . This work, undertaken in 1935, located within the city walls, was the responsibility of the Paris city hall. The temporary terminus at Porte Maillot had four tracks divided into two ordinary stations with side platforms: the depth of the tunnel ruled out the construction of a single vaulted terminus of the type at Porte de Charenton station . The old loop was thus abandoned and the line extended to the new terminus at Porte Maillot on 15 November 1936 .

Beyond this section, the work was taken over by the Seine department: the tunnel was established under the Avenue de Neuilly. Originally planned with three stations, the extension ultimately only had two, including the terminus Pont de Neuilly . The latter, with only two tracks, was designed as a temporary terminus, because it was then planned to extend the line to La Défense after an under-river crossing of the Seine . This "provisional" which lasted more than fifty years would be the cause of numerous operating problems twenty or thirty years later. The work on line 1 was actively carried out in order to be completed before the 1937 World's Fair . The line was opened for operation up to the Pont de Neuilly onApril 29, 1937R 2 .

The pneumatic metro and the creation of the RER

MP 59 train in original livery at Bastille station , in 1964.

Bogies and tires of the MP 59 . Detailed article: Pneumatic metro . During the Second World War , and for the next two decades, Line 1, the busiest on the network, saw its ridership increase to the point of reaching significant overloads (up to 135% of its capacity), which degraded operation and transport conditions. Given the success of the experiment with the pneumatic-tyred metro on Line 11 , it was decided to equip Line 1 with this type of metro in order to increase its capacity by 15 to 20% or more, as the pneumatic-tyred equipment could achieve greater accelerations and decelerations, which increased the commercial speed and rotation of the equipment 12 . Work began at the end of 1960 , but, taking into account the experience of Line 11, the tire tracks were made of metal between stations and of concrete in stations. The new operation of Line 1 began on 30 May 1963 R 3 . The line was equipped with MP 59 equipment from May 1963 to December 1964, replacing the gray Sprague trains . In April 1972, line 1 was the third on the network (after line 11 and line 4 ) to be equipped with a Greek for electronic automatic piloting 13 .

Under the crypt of the Saint-Paul station , in 2010. This increase in capacity being insufficient pending the opening of the large-gauge east-west regional line then under construction, it was also decided to increase the number of cars from five to six and the length of the platforms accordingly to 90 metres note 3 . Some less frequented stations were lengthened by the construction of "crypts" whose ceiling rests on very close pillars 14 .

However, this development alone was not enough to stem the constant growth of traffic on the east-west axis. The SDAURP ( Plan directeur d'aménagement et d'urbanisme de la région parisienne ), published in 1965 under the leadership of Prefect Paul Delouvrier , provided for the creation of a large-gauge regional rail transport network on the scale of the urban area. This highly ambitious plan, already outlined in the 1920s , provided for the priority creation of a major east-west axis, to support regional growth, serve the new business district of La Défense and relieve some of the traffic on metro line 1 and the Saint-Lazare station , then the busiest in France.

The work on the new east-west line also caused an incident on line 1: on the Étoile side, the tunnel of the new link was attacked by an American Robbins machine, delivered inJune 1964. Its progression begins inMarch 1965and proved to be fast, but drilling under the Avenue de la Grande-Armée and under metro line 1, the tunnel foundation collapsed on March 18 due to decompression of the ground. Metro train traffic was interrupted for four days, the time to repair the R 4 infrastructure .

The new line was put into service in sections: first Nation - Boissy-Saint-Léger at the end of 1969, then the La Défense - Étoile shuttle in 1970, the extension of the latter to Auber in 1971, the integration of the Nanterre - Saint-Germain-en-Laye section in 1972. Then, finally, it was the extension to Noisy-le-Grand - Mont d'Est and the opening of the central Auber - Nation section which put into service in its entirety the RER A line , theDecember 9, 1977after five more years of monumental works in the heart of Paris 15 , 16. From the first months of 1978, the transfer of traffic to the new line A was significant: several lines of the urban metro recorded a drop in ridership, line 1, doubled over most of its route, saw its traffic decrease by 25%, which finally made it possible to achieve a more reasonable load during peak hours R 5 .

The metro at La Défense and the creation of line 14

The Esplanade de la Défense station in 2014. THEApril 1 , 1992, the extension planned since the 1930s was finally completed to La Défense 3 . However, unlike the original project, the river was crossed, not by a new under-river crossing, but in the middle of the Pont de Neuilly , in order to significantly reduce construction costs and because of the presence of the RER line A tunnel , built during the 1960s . This modification required the complete reworking of the rear of the Pont de Neuilly station . The bridge itself was widened by the construction of new cantilevered sidewalks over the Seine, in order to free up sufficient space for the metro in its middle 17 . The land reserved twenty years earlier by the Public Establishment for the Development of the La Défense Region (EPAD) for the extension, including in particular the La Défense - Michelet and Élysées - La Défense stations , therefore remained unused in favor of a passage via what was to be one of the two tubes of the A14 motorway (which passes through a tunnel under La Défense) 18 .

Given that the Paris metro is not subject to fare zoning , La Défense station is in the particular situation of being subject to kilometer fares (zone 3) for the RER , while it is not subject to any special fares for line 1 (access with a simple t+ ticket ).

Ironically, the considerable success of RER line A , which quickly became the busiest transport line in France, led to its rapid saturation, with 272.8 million passengers in 2004 19 . In order to limit the overload, the Council of Ministers decided in October 1989 to create a new RER line, EOLE , and a new fully automatic metro line which opened in October 1998 under the name metro line 14 . Despite its very rapid increase in capacity (19 million passengers in 1999, 64.1 million in 2004), it did not reduce the constant increase in traffic on metro line 1, nor on RER line A, which was always on the verge of saturation

Bibliography

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