Little Belt

A rusted iron track bed cuts through the nineteenth arrondissement, overgrown with wildflowers and thickets of buddleia. This is the Petite Ceinture, a circular railway built in the eighteen fifties to connect Paris’s major train stations. For decades, steam engines hauled freight and passengers along this loop until the city’s underground metro system rendered the trains obsolete. Trains stopped running entirely in nineteen thirty-four, and the steel rails sat silent while nature slowly reclaimed the path between the stone embankments.