Good morning Lyon!
Some Googling overnight, and I felt like we could navigate the local public transport. Step one: the Lyon Metro.
It’s got four lines and 42 stations, and carries a similar number of passenger trips as Melbourne’s suburban rail system – pretty good going for a metropolitan area with about half Melbourne’s population.
It helps that much of the city has pretty dense residential and commercial areas, and that the metro lines run every 4-5 minutes most of the day.
The broader TCL (Transports en commun lyonnais) network of metro, trams and buses, and accepts contactless bank card fare payment (aka contactless).
The combination bank card payment, GTFS (eg Google Maps), and a network of frequent services are the key things that make a city’s public transport network. easily navigable by tourists. Lyon’s had all three.
Bank card payment is relatively new, and I noticed the buses and trams and metro fare gates have two sets of card readers on them. Bank cards use the red ones.
So, our cards at the ready, we caught metro Line A a few stops. This section was built as cut-and-cover, under a main road, much of which was then rebuilt and pedestrianised.
Many of the stations have side platforms, and the entries and exits are mostly standalone. At most stations if you’re heading east you need one entry; west is a different one. Without dedicated multi-direction concourses, many of the stations seem quite small scale compared to some cities.
Some of the platforms and stairways are quite narrow, though the trains themselves seem quite roomy compared to those in Paris and London.
A quirk is that the metro trains drive on the left – because it was planned they might one day interact with the long distance trains – which in turn were built to run on the left in France and Belgium thanks to the influence of British engineers – despite roads being the opposite.
We headed to the Museum of Fine Arts – the perfect way to start the day, given – for the first time on the holiday – it was raining. Not raining hard, but enough that it was better to be indoors for a couple of hours.
There’s plenty to explore, including a substantial exhibit of Egyptian artefacts, which was really interesting. And like most European museums, they’ve got enough old masters that any Australian gallery would be delighted.
By lunchtime, we headed to the museum cafe, and found it packed. So instead we exited and looked around for somewhere to eat, ending up at… Pret. Yes, they have it in France.
Nearby was a silk workshop. Lyon was once the world’s silk capital, and has a long history from the 15th century onwards. We had a look inside, and the others stayed for a while looking around, while I walked around the block taking a few photos.
Then we did a little shopping, before finding a cafe for some afternoon tea. Amused to see Peach Melba on the menu, I ordered one. It’s not a dish I have very often. Delicious. (Does it count as Australian? Only in name – it was invented by a French chef at a hotel in London.)
The rack railway
From there we headed north and caught Metro line C a few stops.
This, you might say, is a bit different. It’s a rack railway – a cog wheel connects to a rack, allowing the train to climb steep gradients. Which it does – up the side of a hill for just 2.4 kilometres. But it’s busy enough, with trains every 7-8 minutes until midnight. And they were pretty busy.
We had a walk around St Croix, gradually heading back the way we’d come (but on foot), and keeping an eye out for murals.
This spectacular one, for instance:
In a square in Croix Rousse, we paused, looking for Montée de la Grande Côte – a pathway taking us back down the hill towards the town hall.
A trolleybus went past, and I was beginning to realise that Lyon is heaven for public transport nerds. It’s got buses, trams, a metro, long distance trains (including high speed), funiculars (more on them tomorrow), rack railways and trolleybuses.
Looking around, we must have looked lost, because someone asked (in English) if we needed directions. Bizarrely it turned out to be an Australian, not quite a tourist – he was staying in Lyon for an extended period.
We headed down the hilly street, enjoying the views and exploring the shops as we went.
At one point I noticed a newspaper headline: “Metro projects after the elections?” Presumably transport is just as much a political football as it is in Australia.
The path down the hill led us back to the gallery from that morning, where we hopped on the metro back towards the apartment.
