Limoges to Bordeaux by train, France.
Crossing through Périgord via the roads less traveled.
It had rained all evening in Limoges, and the news channels were ominously talking about travel disruptions, as the rain would intensify overnight. This wasn’t your grandmother’s storm, but a dense, heavy downpour that soaked everything relentlessly, under dark grey skies that felt they would never open up again.
As I awoke the following morning, I tried to listen for the rain, hoping that it would have stopped, and the Météo France forecast would have been proven wrong. At first, I couldn’t hear anything, but after a few seconds, the soft, almost whispering noise of rain drops hitting my hotel window confirmed this would be another wet day.
I had walked in the city the evening before, because I had never been in Limoges and wanted to get a feel for the ancient capital city of the Limousin region. I had come back to my room soaking wet. As I got up, I realized my clothes hadn’t dried overnight, and unless I begged for a hair dryer at reception, I was going to smell like a wet dog all day long.
I was in Limoges for a specific reason: riding a regional train service to Bordeaux. I enjoy traveling on the roads less traveled, and this small regional line crossing the Limousin and Périgord regions on its way to the Nouvelle Aquitaine capital was one I had never been on. While France as a whole is a major train country, with well-maintained rail lines seeing frequent intercity services linking most major cities, the center of the country, given its lower population and its more mountainous geography isn’t as lucky.
Limoges actually sits on a line linking Paris to Toulouse, famous for its now-retired flagship train Le Capitole, and this line sees frequent service (although its users would complain train sets are showing their age). Getting anywhere else than north (to Paris) or south (to Toulouse) from Limoges is a little more complicated. Limoges was a train hub, and many tracks lead to other destinations, from Poitiers to Ussel to Guéret or Périgueux. These tracks, however, have lacked the necessary investments for years and services are usually slow, sparse, with few passengers.
SNCF line 611, linking Limoges to Périgueux is one of them. It’s a single-track line for most of its length that sees only a few regional services a day. It crosses very remote parts of the Nouvelle Aquitaine region and as such sees very little traffic.
The single track would meander through fields, forests and meadows.
I wasn’t going just to Périgueux. My train would continue on to Bordeaux, on line 621, a more modern, dual track line. Fun fact: the six trains linking Limoges to Bordeaux everyday have to reverse in Périgueux. The front becomes the back and whoever was riding forward to Périgueux now rides backwards to Bordeaux. As a result, these services are always operated with reversible train sets, and the stop in Périgueux only lasts a few more minutes than usual.
My 10.58am train would leave from platform I in Limoges-Bénédictins station, an incredible work of architecture worth its own article (and on which you can find more details here). After grabbing a few newspapers at the station’s Relay, I made my way down to the train.
I was excited to discover this part of France through the rain-soaked windows of a TER, or Train Express Regional, as regional trains are called in France. My train was made of two X81500 diesel/electric trainsets that would link the two cities in a bit more than 2h30.
French regions have been investing heavily in their train networks over the past few years, to prop up a transit mode that is seen as ecological and potentially cheaper or more convenient than using a car for commuting to work. This train set, however, had seen better days. Its interior was comfortable but dirty and in need of a good cleaning.
I enjoyed the wide windows and the relative comfort of my second-class seat. I picked a backwards seat knowing full well it would become a forward seat after Périgueux, for the (slightly) longer leg of the journey.
It had stopped raining when I boarded the train, but the rain quickly started again, and within a few minutes of us leaving Limoges, our windows started getting hit by bigger and bigger drops that would seem to scratch the surface of the windows as they crashed on the speeding train.
This part of France is very rural, and the single track would meander through fields, forests and meadows under a cloudy, almost foggy sky that made it almost magical. For a while, I wondered if I had inadvertently taken Harry Potter’s Hogwarts Express.
After Thiviers, however, the landscape widened as we got into what French people call le Périgord Vert, or Green Perigord. At the same time, the sun made a few shy apparitions and the lush green of the trees took on a more vibrant hue, as if waking up from a winter that hadn’t come yet (I made this trip in September).
We left the lush rural hills of the Green Périgord to follow the wide valley of the Isle river.
It’s hard to describe how I feel when I ride a regional train service on a rural line in the middle of nowhere. It’s a little bit as if time has been suspended. The train flies along fields, forests, isolated farms, crosses a river, and while you know it’s getting somewhere, you’re as good as lost, not seeing a single car, or even a road for miles and miles. I experienced the same feeling on my trip from Brive to Aurillac last year, while the train was passing by the Cère river gorge, where no road comes through. It’s an amazing feeling of being both isolated among the landscape yet surrounded by fellow passengers.
After a little more than an hour, our train glided into the Périgueux station. Périgueux is fairly high on my list of French cities to visit, being a UNESCO site as well as an incredible culinary destination. It wouldn’t be for today, however, as I remained on the train.
Much of the traffic on this service is actually concentrated between Périgueux and Bordeaux. While my coach was barely half full before, it was now packed, with no available seat until we reached Bordeaux Saint-Jean.
The topography of the second part of the voyage was very different. We left the lush rural hills of the Green Périgord to follow the wide valley of the Isle river. The landscape opened up, and I could feel we were getting closer to the sea (although we were still a long way from it). The line had two tracks, laid down in a much straighter line to allow for higher speeds, and we stopped a few times in villages that brought even more people to the train.
It started raining again – it felt like a strong storm at times, but I let myself get rolled by the gentle motions of the train, and read for a bit. There are few thing that are more relaxing than reading a good book on a train while it’s raining outside. I could have done with a nice wood fire, but alas, that’s not part of the service.
It was sunny again by the time we got to Bordeaux. A few miles before, our train had merged onto the historic main line between Bordeaux and Paris at the Coutras station, and we were now stopping under the monumental glass roof of the Saint-Jean station, right after having cross the Garonne river. A dual TGV Inoui trainset was waiting to leave for Paris a few platforms away, and its white livery was glistening in the afternoon sun.
It was a nice reminder that not all French lines allow to ride in the slow lane, across fields and forests. This train would get to Paris in a little over two hours, a little less than what it took for me to get from Limoges to Bordeaux (a distance much shorter in kilometers).
As I got off the TER, I realized I couldn’t wait to plan my next French rail trip on the roads less traveled. There are many other regional French lines I want to experience, so more to come!
Images from top to bottom: Regional train service Limoges-Bordeaux at its terminus, the same train set waiting to depart from Limoges-Bénédictins station earlier in the day, the departure information on the platform in Limoges, inside a second class coach, landscape near Nexon on our way to Périgueux, Mussidan station seen from a wet train window, a dual TGV train set in Bordeaux St-Jean.
All images are mine.