Go underground on a tour of the Paris Métro

The French have a more grown-up attitude than the British towards sex, drinking and railways. Regarding the latter, the approach is that French trains work, and so they should, given the amount of public money put into them. This leaves little room for the underdog trainspotter on the British model, a self-consciously marginal figure who presents himself shambolically in emulation of a shambolic network. But a more refined and worldly kind of rail enthusiast does exist, and one such is Julian Pepinster, whose special subject is the Paris Métro.

I first met the Anglo-French Pepinster, 37, some years ago over dinner. He was working in insurance while running a society known by the acronym Ademas (www.ademas-assoc.com), and dedicated to appreciation of an early Métro train engineer, Frank Julian Sprague, who gave his name to the classic Métro stock phased out in the early 1980s: pretty yet spartan trains with hard wooden seats and sparks flying out from underneath.

Pepinster now works for the security department of the Métro, and has collaborated on a new book about the system, Paris Métro Style, with Mark Ovenden, author of the international bestseller (yes, really), Metro Maps of the World. Pepinster – who often travels on the Métro in his spare time “just to relax” – offered me a tour, beginning at Gare du Nord on Line 4.

The train came in after about 30 seconds. I have never waited more than two minutes for a Métro train, or been stuck in a tunnel. This is because the Métro was, in the French way, planned (rather than arising haphazardly from the schemes of speculators, as with the Tube). There’s none of that Edgware/High Barnet nonsense seen on London’s Northern Line. The Paris lines are simple. The trains go to the end, then come back.

Line 4 is one of those featuring trains with tyres. Pepinster is ambivalent about these. “They were brought in to make the trains look more like cars.” But the tyres mean faster braking. There’s a pleasing terseness to the Métro: the train stops quickly; the nearest passenger to the door flips the catch – the loqueteau – and the doors bang open. I always fantasise that I am chasing a suspect, or being chased, in a French policier when I do this.

I mentioned to Pepinster that, for all this briskness, I felt more relaxed on the Métro than the Tube, and he suggested that this was partly because Métro tunnels are not tubular, but vault-shaped: “They remind you of the wine cellar of a château, which is a pleasant thing to be reminded of.” The shape is dictated by the method of construction. A narrow hole was dug in the street, then widened out below. The tunnels were lined in white tiles with bevelled edges, “which means they sparkle”.

At Châtelet, we changed to Line 1, and went to Louvre-Rivoli station, where subtle lighting displays pieces of statuary, replicas of those in the museum above. This is one of a dozen themed stations on the Métro, and in these (again, that French severity) advertising is not allowed. My favourite is the one at Arts et Métiers. It’s lined with riveted copper, like the inside of Captain Nemo’s submarine.

We exited the station, and crossed the Rue de Rivoli towards the entrance of Palais Royal station, which looks like a bejewelled bird cage. It was created by Jean-Michel Othoniel for the Métro centenary of 2000. It’s small for a station entrance but then Métro entrances are usually small. Paris, the creators of the Métro acknowledged, was beautiful, and the street scenes ought not to be disrupted. Attention would be drawn to the system by the beauty of the entrances, not their size, hence the sinuous, green, art nouveau ironwork of Hector Guimard, which survives at a third of the 273 stations. For years after the opening of the Métro in 1900, entrances didn’t even proclaim the station name.

As we roved around the network Pepinster talked constantly, but never boringly. He does the same on the nocturnal tours of closed-down Métro stations sometimes operated by his group, Ademas. As these tours depart, Pepinster reads a Latin quote from Fulgence Bienvenüe, chief engineer of the Métro at the time of its construction: “Jovis erepto fulmine per inferna vehitur Promethei genus”, which means something like, “Prometheus’s children are transported in the underground inferno with the power of Jupiter.” The tours finish at dawn in a depot beneath Gare du Nord, with a chance to walk along an inspection pit underneath a Métro train while drinking kir royale.

We were now at Oberkampf station on Line 5. In the 1960s, it was decided that white tiling was boring – “People said, ‘Why must our stations look like bathrooms?’” – so something more psychedelic was tried in a few cases: orange tiling. The Line 5 platforms at Oberkampf are the most orange on the network. The effect is queasy, and the orange is now regarded as a mistake, as was fitting steel panelling into certain stations to accommodate advertising hoardings. (We saw an example at Trinité-d’Estienne d’Orves on Line 12). This was called “carrossage”, and it disrupted the purity of the vault, just as false ceilings or boarded-over fireplaces were beginning to spoil historic houses of the time. But a current renovation programme will restore the original purity: white tiles, white station names on blue backgrounds.

For the grande finale, Pepinster took me to Gare d’Austerlitz, where the Métro station, far from being underground, is excitingly incorporated into the glass roof of the mainline station. The line then crosses over the Seine, giving glorious vistas. Pepinster pointed out the sights, including that of the Paris Morgue on the right bank. Naturally enough, all the other Parisians in the carriage continued to read their newspapers.

‘Paris Métro Style’ is published by Capital Transport Publishing (£29.95)

Andrew Martin travelled to Paris on Eurostar from St Pancras International. Return fares from £69. Tel: 0870 5186 186; www.eurostar.com