The derailed locomotive | Granville–Paris Express / Gare Montparnasse (1895)
The Montparnasse derailment occurred at 4 pm on 22 October 1895 when the Granville–Paris Express overran the buffer stop at its Gare Montparnasse terminus. With the train several minutes late and the driver trying to make up for lost time, it entered the station too fast and the train air brake failed. After running through the buffer stop, the train crossed the station concourse and crashed through the station wall before falling onto the Place de Rennes below, where it stood on its nose. A woman in the street below was killed by falling masonry. The driver was fined 50 francs and one of the guards 25 francs.
The derailed locomotive, 1895
The train was outside the station in this position for several days and a number of photographs were taken. This photograph has become iconic and widely reproduced. A replica of the crashed locomotive has been built in a theme park in Brazil.
Tell me, Blaise, are we very far from Montmartre?'
Worries
Forget your worries
All the stations full of cracks tilted along the way
The telegraph wires they hang from
The grimacing poles that gesticulate and strangle them
The world stretches lengthens and folds in like an accordion tormented by a sadistic hand
In the cracks of the sky the locomotives in anger
Flee
And in the holes,
The whirling wheels the mouths the voices
And the dogs of misfortune that bark at our heels
The demons are unleashed
Iron rails
Everything is off-key
The broun-roun-roun of the wheels
Shocks
Bounces
We are a storm under a deaf man's skull…
'Tell me, Blaise, are we very far from Montmartre?'
Hell yes, you're getting on my nerves you know very well we're far away
Overheated madness bellows in the locomotive
Plague, cholera rise up like burning embers on our way
We disappear in the war sucked into a tunnel
Hunger, the whore, clings to the stampeding clouds
And drops battle dung in piles of stinking corpses
Do like her, do your job
'Tell me, Blaise, are we very far from Montmartre?
Blaise Cendrars / Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of the Little Jeanne de France / 1913
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