Tramway de Pithiviers à Toury.

Afternoon All,

Back in 1964, gosh - that's 62 years ago! - I paid a visit to the 60cm gauge Tramway de Pithiviers à Toury in central France. This was a narrow gauge system that connected these two towns, but it also had numerous branches to serve outlying farms. All told it extended to some 80 km or 50 miles. Passenger services ceased in 1951 or 2, depending which website you look at. Freight services continued but, in later years, these only ran in the Autumn and Winter months to enable the sugar beet farmers to get their harvest to the sugar refineries at Toury and Pithiviers.

Our visit was in the October of that year, so right at the beginning of the sugar beet harvesting season. The weather was bright and sunny in the morning, but deteriorated after lunch with low cloud and squally showers. This made photography difficult with the slow films and slow lenses of the day. Nevertheless, we did the best we could under the circumstances although some of the colour slides have also deteriorated over the years which hasn't helped in editing them.

However, as the system closed down at the end of December, 1964, we were unable to go back there again and hope for better conditions, so the picture we did take are all we were going to get.

A short section from Pithiviers was later reopened as a museum railway, but it's a far cry from original line, but worth a visit if in the area.

My photos from 1964 are now on my Flickr site and if anyone would like to see them, there're here:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/train-pix/albums/72157711679587736/

Hope there're of interest.

TTFN,

Ron.
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Fascinating.
On the pic captioned "R2010. Y6451 at Pithiviers.", there appears to be an even-narrower gauge track crossing the line the loco is on just behind it. Is that an illusion, or actually the case?

 

The diesel shunter is an SNCF standard gauge loco and it's crossing the 2ft / 60cm gauge TPT line. These were the exchange sidings outside the sugar refinery where the two gauges met.

 

Ah, so the crossing line is narrower. Just narrower then the wider standard gauge. Shame, I was hoping for a previously unknown Greenly railway in France

 

A.I to the rescue?! A combination of poor light, slow film, a slow lens, slow shutter speed and the deterioration of the colour slides over the passage of 62 years mean the the photos I put on Flickr weren't as good as I would have liked them to be. Someone that saw them suggested that I might be able to improve them using Artificial Intelligence so I decided to give it a go. I've never used it before so it was a bit of a learning curve and they're still by no means perfect, but, hopefully, they're an improvement on what went before with some being better than others.

They're now also on Flickr so if you'd like to have a look they're here:

https://flic.kr/s/aHBqjD5BVS

TTFN,

Ron.