'The Truffle Train' Revisited - Sunday 25th June 2023

On holiday in the Dordogne France in June I visited the 'Truffle Line' again nine years almost after my first visit on 29th June 2014.
On the last occasion I took mainly photos of the line so wanted to return to video the journey.
The same French loco was in steam again & rode behind it.
The Railway is carved into the cliffs of Mirandol, towering 80 metres (260ft) above the River Dordogne.
In the early days, the trains were used to transport truffles. Martel was outstandingly famous throughout France hence its nickname ‘Le Truffadou’
A journey of 8 miles (13 Km) round trip, more than 80 meters (260 feet) high cliff, giving a wonderful panorama of the Dordogne Valley.
The line, originally from Saint-Denis-près-Martel to Souillac, was built in the early 1880s as part of a line between Toulouse and Paris to carry, timber for making wine casks and truffles.
While the main Paris to Toulouse line prospered on the opposite side of the river - which includes a fine 1863 bridge designed by Gustave Eiffel - ‘Le Truffadou’ never really achieved the potential of which its original builders had dreamed.
Traffic continued to decline, and had it not been for the outbreak of the Second World War, the route might have been abandoned completely. Its continued use was down to the French Resistance, who derailed a heavy locomotive on the main line and thus blocked access to Eiffel’s bridge. Traffic, once again, had to use ‘Le Truffadou’ - but traffic on a scale for which it had never been designed. The line had steep gradients - 1-in-50 in places - so the 40 or 50 heavy trains which re-routed along it every day required two, and sometimes three, heavy locomotives pulling at the front, and a banker engine at the rear. It is a testament to the robustness of the original construction that it could cope with such traffic.
After the war, the route continued to be used for both freight and local passenger traffic, but by the 1970s, this was down to no more than two or three trains a day, and even that ceased in May 1980 when the line was finally closed down.
It remained abandoned for nearly 12 years before being rescued by the preservation society, and just five years after it was taken over, paying passengers once again savoured its delights in the summer of 1997.
The route of the single-track railway takes it alongside the Dordogne for some of its way, but running high above the river on a ledge hewn out of the cliff face, through several tunnels, and across a spectacular viaduct. The largest locomotive at Martel is a 2-10-0 locomotive, former DB No. 50.3361 - built in 1941 by Austria’s premier locomotive builder, Lokomotivfabrik Floridsdorf - which spent most of it's working life in East Germany, and was retired long before German reunification. It was acquired by the society in 2007, but restoring it will be a major long-term undertaking.
The oldest locomotive is Trambouze, a 0-6-0T, built by Schneider et Cie in Le Creuzot, in eastern France, in 1891, and rebuilt in 1922.
You can view the video & photographs taken on my first visit using this link:
• Steam Train of Martel ...

[@SimonTog]

Interesseting video :)

[@caerphillycastle]

Thank you