User:Rho9998/Argenton-sur-Creuse railway station

Argenton-sur-Creuse train station is a train station in France on the Orléans-Montauban railway, located within the commune of Argenton-sur-Creuse, in the département of Indre, in the Centre-Val de Loire region.

It is an SNCF train station served by trains of the Intercités and TER Centre-Val de Loire networks.

Location
At an altitude of 110 metres, Argenton-sur-Creuse railway station is located at 295.055 km along Orléans-Montaubran railway line, between the stations of Chabenet and Celon.

A former junction station, it was also the origin of the abandoned Argenton-sur-Creuse - La Chaussée railway towards La Châtre and the terminus of the partially abandoned Port-de-Piles - Argenton-sur-Creuse line. Until 1938, it was also the terminus of a light metre-gauge railway line (Le Blanc - Argenton-sur-Creuse via Saint-Benoît-du-Sault), which opened in 1904.

History
The station was inaugurated on the 1st of May 1854.

In1888, the station's revenue was 575,075 francs.

On the 6th of June 1915 at half past midnight, a freight train pulling 39 wagons from Limoges lost control near Celon and ended up crashing into a manoeuvring train at Argenton station. The destructed wagons chaotically piled up in the Saint-Paul bridge cutting and the train's food product load spread as far as the rue Gambetta. Trains would not begin circulating again until the 10th of June.

On the morning of the 9th of June 1944, the train station became the location of a skirmish between a German military detachment and a group of French Resistance fighters lead by Colonel Roland Despains. This skirmish, won by the Résistance, was followed by the Argenton-sur-Creuse Massacre. Over the course of the day, a number of railway workers and passengers were killed, injured, or taken hostage, despite the intercessions of the stationmaster, M. Vautrin, who spoke German and played an important role in saving as many of his staff as possible on a number of occasions.

On the 31st of August 1985, a Corail train from Paris-Austerlitz to Port-Bou derailed just after the station, because of excessive speed. The speed limit had been set at 40 km/h due to work on the lines. The train was passing at roughly 100 km/h when emergency breaking was triggered, causing a many of the carriages to derail. In particular, two of these carriages spilt over onto the adjacent tracks. This, at the same time a postal train from Brive-la-Gaillarde going towards Paris in the opposite direction arrived. The locomotive of the latter planted itself into the two overhanging carriages. The accident caused 43 fatalities. It was caused by an overlaying of signals making it difficult to understand which signals were to be used by the driver.

Frequentation
Passenger numbers for the station are detailed in the table below: