Dijon-Ville station

The full story

For the Paris-Lyon line to pass through Dijon, the hills first had to be overcome: between Blaisy-Bas and Baulme-la-Roche, the track must cross the watershed between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, at around 500 metres above sea level. From 1846 to 1851, 2,000 workers bored the Blaisy tunnel there from 23 shafts, the deepest of which goes down 200 metres. At 4,114 metres long, it remained the longest tunnel in the world for some twenty years. A record of the Inventory of French railway tunnels credits the work to “the engineer Darcy”.

In town, the station and its tracks meant demolishing part of the fortifications, but the Guise bastion, a pointed defensive work, was spared. It had been built in 1547 and 1548 to plans by the Italian engineer Girolamo Bellarmato, at the request of Claude de Guise, governor of Burgundy, and was turned into a tree-lined promenade in the 18th century. Listed as a historic monument on 21 December 1944, it still shows its dressed-stone walls on Rue des Corroyeurs. Nearby, on Rue Monge, a railway bridge decorated with the coats of arms of the city and of Burgundy marks the boundary between the old Tivoli and Miséricorde ramparts.

During the Great War, Dijon-Ville and the Porte-Neuve station, opened in 1872, became transit hubs for the wounded, soldiers on leave and refugees from the occupied regions of the north. Opened on 15 April 1916, the “Poilus-Palace” was more than a canteen: soldiers could also rest, wash and relax there. On 5 July and 10 August 1944, British bombing raids targeted the tracks and the Perrigny-lès-Dijon marshalling yard: 582 houses were damaged and 184 destroyed. On 7 September, the station lost its great hall of metal and glass in the explosion.

From 1945, temporary buildings had to do: construction of a new passenger building only began in 1960. Opened in July 1963, the present station is the work of the Paris architects Alfred Audoul and Paul Peirani. Its round entrance hall refers to the rotunda of Saint-Bénigne, and its silhouette soon earned it the nickname “cocotte minute” (pressure cooker). A reinforced-concrete frame of posts and beams frees up the vast concourse with its large windows, and the façades are clad in Buxy stone.

Since 2012, the station has also been the starting point of tram line T1. From 2020 to 2022, works costing 39.4 million euros made it accessible to all: every platform now has its own lift, ramp and staircase. Around 16,000 passengers and 360 trains pass through it every day.