Since it was a lovely warm day, I decided to go to Metz. Above is the rather novel touch of placing a photo of the town onto the steps in Thionville. My train had been booked the day before using the SNCF ticket machines and the pricing wasn’t unreasonable, at €12. The ticket machines were very easy to use and were helpfully available in English.

One thing that British railway stations are usually quite bad on is indicating where a carriage will be when the train stops. With long trains it’s useful to know where to stand to avoid having quite a lengthy walk to the other end of the train. So, I was very impressed with this and everyone was very clear where to stand.

The train glided in smoothly, and it is a beautiful looking train. The train was on time, indeed actually a couple of minutes early, and there were clear announcements made. The train crew looked bored though and didn’t seem to be helping customers and instead just talked to themselves. Perhaps it’s not their job to help elderly customers with bags, but they could have done.

The other little problem was that the system to tell customers where to stand for their carriage entirely failed. The carriages were nowhere near where they should have been, leaving all of the passengers to rush towards where their ticket told them to be.

Which leaves the next problem, every TGV service requires a customer to have a seat reservation. But, it seemed no-one was sitting where they were meant to be sitting, so the whole thing becomes a little challenging. I just found a seat that wasn’t taken, but I notice a series of people shuffling around because it wasn’t very clear.

The interior of the TGV, could have been a little cleaner, but it looks like a well-made train. The leg-room on the seats was inferior to that of Amtrak in the United States, but to be fair, Amtrak do offer ridiculous amounts of space.

It wasn’t that busy on the train journey to Metz, although it was early on a Sunday morning. The seats themselves were clean and there were power points so that customers could charge their devices. It felt a comfortable environment and there were handy tray tables at every seat.

The train journey itself was smooth and rather pleasant, none of the clattering about of the trains on some regional lines. The service was also fast and it arrived into Metz on time, with the conductor making announcements in both French and English. My ticket wasn’t though checked and I didn’t see the conductor walking through the train, which might have been helpful for any customer who needed assistance of any kind.

The two photos above are of the TGV I got back to Thionville at the end of the day.

It’s too hot today. The sun is shining, there are no clouds and the temperature is too high. So that means the outside must be avoided and museums found which are shady and cool. This museum actually transpired not to be as cold I had hoped, but it was a welcome respite from the global warming issues of outside. Literally meaning ‘the museum of the Flea Tower’, parts of this building date to the eleventh century. Today, this is used as the town’s municipal museum.

From the first century, a Roman dedication to the God of Mercury. It’s the first time that I’ve realised that the Mercure hotel chain, part of Accor, means Mercury….

I’m slightly puzzled by the restraints, but the building was used as a military prison, so perhaps there is some link with that.

The view down inside the main part of the building from the top floor.

It’s a rather complex building with staircases and doors all over the place….. It reminds me of the Excalibur hotel in Las Vegas, a place that I miss very much.

An early Thionville document.

A map showing the early fortifications of Thionville.

More evidence of the number of different levels in the building and the steps to get to them.

There were a couple of skeletons on display at the museum, this one is from the prehistoric period.

The Altar to the Homeland in Thionville was constructed on 22 September 1796, during the fervour of the French Revolution. There were many of these altars erected during the Revolution, but they were usually built of wood and many were lost under Napoleon’s rule, with this being the last stone one left in the country. It was intended initially to be a focal point for patriotic gatherings, with this one later being relocated to a cemetery and repurposed as a war memorial before being brought back here].

Apparently this is the only one of the 36,000 ‘Altars to the Homeland’ which still stand in France. Which sounds a little unusual and I haven’t yet ascertained as to why just this one exists. But it’s very lovely and the town is apparently very proud of it.

I’m not quite sure what the technical word is for these little statue things, but they’re located above the doors of shops. These are the two that the historical walking leaflet they gave me at the tourist information office mentioned to visit.

This is a sign that was once used by the local brewery.

This is the sign that once indicated a tobacconist’s shop, for which they used a representation of a slave sitting on tobacco and smoking a pipe (long since gone).

This street dates from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with the staircases apparently being a legacy of the occupation of Thionville by the Spanish in the sixteenth century. Very pretty little street, right near to the town centre.

Currently a little bit of a building site, this is apparently a “stronghold” church, designed to withstand attack. The towers were used as a lookout point  and it’s quite an attractive church inside, albeit a little covered up due to construction work.

Some of the photos below seem to be at a bit of an angle, I assume that the church was leaning slightly.

After arriving safely at the railway station in Luxembourg I faced the problem that was the SNCF rail strike. I decided to keep my trip to France, rather than changing to Germany, as the media had reported over recent weeks that support for the strike was falling and that more services were operating.

After checking with a staff member, they said that the trains to Thionville were running every hour, with the half hourly ones being cancelled. That was my expectation from the SNCF web-site, so I went to buy a ticket from a machine. The machine only let me buy tickets on services that were operating, so all seemed well.

Then the board never updated the platform that the train was going from and it then got “deleted”. I went to speak to the staff at the main information kiosk at the station and they confirmed I’d need to wait an hour for the one after.

There seemed something strange about this that didn’t quite ring true, as I didn’t see why so many trains would be cancelled to Thionville, especially as they had just sold me a ticket. So I went to the international departures desk and asked them.

The lady there was very helpful, and she was rather bemused at the situation as well. After a long conversation with her colleagues she said that she thought that the train was running and the information boards were wrong. She then suggested to go to platform nine and see if the train I had booked onto was running, and if not to speak to the conductor on the TGV service to Paris (which stops at Thionville) to see if they’d let me on.

As I got to the platform I could see the train that I had a ticket for was there and wasn’t looking very cancelled. I found a staff member who told me to get on as it was about to leave, which I did, although I was a still little unsure of whether this was actually the right train.

However, the right train it was and my trip to Thionville began. Luxembourg railway station is the first place that I took Dylan to, so happy memories of the place, although it was rather more stressful this time. Still lots of pigeons that looked like they might “get squished”.

The train was a double decker one and looked modern and well presented, although it was unclean and had rather a lot of litter on the floor. The prices for the train also weren’t that cheap, more expensive than the UK for the same distance. However, I got to Thionville safely and happily, so the end result was all very positive.

Thionville railway station.