Petite Ceinture du 17e (PC 17)

The Petite Ceinture in the seventeenth arrondissement appears as a sunken, overgrown trench cut straight through the dense city blocks of the Batignolles neighborhood. This abandoned rail line once circled Paris to carry freight and passengers, but fell into silence when the city outgrew its nineteenth-century transit needs. In the early nineteen-twenties, a train driver named Lucien abandoned his locomotive right here on these tracks, walked home, and never returned to his shift, leaving the engine to rust among the rising weeds.