13. France 2013 – Angers – Part 1
Sunday September 1
We slept in a little later than normal, as it was a Sunday, and our
destination, Angers, is a small city with a small tramway, one we thought
we could cover in a relatively short amount of time. After breakfast we
caught the 9:18 train for the 40-minute ride in beautifully clear weather.
Our train left 4 minutes late and arrived 4 minutes late. Our eventual
destination would be Tours, where we would spend the next two nights, so
upon our arrival the first order of business was to find lockers for our
luggage. No such luck. However, this time turned out better than our
experience in Brest, as the proprietor of the hotel/bar across from the
station happily took our bags at no charge. We rewarded him by having a
second breakfast, and later upon leaving the city, a late afternoon snack at
his establishment.
Angers: Population: City 150,000; Metro Area 300,000
Distance: 190 miles west southwest of Paris, 1∏ hours
System Length: 7.5 miles
No. Lines: 1
No. Stations: 25
Year Opened: 2011
Rolling Stock: 17 Citadis 302
We got going at about 10:30 and immediately were confronted with
Sunday morning headways of 36 minutes. This would be cut to every 24
minutes about two hours later, so we chose to ride before engaging in
photography. The nearest tram station was at the side of the Gare, where
the tramway operates on a road overpass one level above the station
concourse and two over the railway tracks. The first car that came in was
headed southbound, so we rode in that direction and noted that there was
not too much of interest on this part of the line, save for a section where
one track is in the roadway while the other is in manicured grass,
something similar to Essex Street on the Hudson-Bergen line in Jersey
City. I guess we were getting jaded after having seen so many modern
tramways in the past week. We were impressed, however, by the bright
and sparkling colors applied to the rolling stock.
The operation in the other direction turned out to be both interesting and
photogenic. We decided that with a population of only 300,000 in the
metropolitan area, it was odd that Angers built a tramway – and was
planning a second line. On top of that the city fathers had opted for an
expensive APS underground power collection system, which was installed
on two separate segments of the line. [We could not help contemplating
what it would be like if all areas of this size in the U. S. would have
streetcars. Of course, they once did. But what do we know, we're not
Frenchmen. We also wondered whether a NIMBY population in Angers
argued against the project, complaining that the capital needed to build the
line should have been directed toward education. But again, we realized
we were not in San Antonio, Columbus or Indianapolis, whose
metropolitan area population is around 2 million, but instead in backward
looking "old Europe."ˇ]
More about the system in the photo captions in Part 2 of the report.
Four views of the rolling stock follow on the next two pages.
The 17 Alstom Citadis 302 100-percent low-floor cars are shown flaunting their
bright colors in the bright sun. We took advantage of the carhouse gate being
wide open on this Sunday to take these photographs. The color sequence of the
stripes is that of a natural rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet. The
transit operator of Angers is called Irigo