Submitted by Lucas K., who says:
Hello, I know this is an odd question but I figured that if anyone would know this, you would: So I was browsing a map of Paris’s Transilien railway services when I spotted an oddity: A terminal station directly below Gare Montparnasse: Paris Vaugirard. I look all over the Internet but no trace of any Paris Vaugirard station can be found. Do you know what is going on here?
Transit Maps says:
It totally exists, Lucas, although it took me a while to track it down!
It’s also known as Montparnasse III, and it’s a glorified side entrance to the main Gare de Montparnasse complex as well as housing platforms 25-28 separately to the others (1 to 24 are in the main station). Here’s a Google Street View image of its rather unprepossessing entrance on the Rue du Contenin: the main station is behind us to the left.
And here’s a PDF showing how it all fits together: Vaugirard is “Hall 3″ on this map. French Wikipedia says it’s mainly used for long-distance trains coming from Granville or Argentan, but I guess that some Transilien services can call here on occasion, hence its inclusion on the map.
Mystery solved!
Now, onto the map, which once again proves that zone/tariff maps are the ugly step-sister in the transit map world.
Seriously, this is easily the worst of the many Ile-de-France maps, with possibly the worst attempt at concentric zones I’ve ever seen, wobbling unconvincingly around all over the place to “join the dots” between stations. The green bands clash with a lot of the route line colours, and they’re especially horrid when combined with the magenta terminal station labels (Why?!).
The route lines aren’t much better, as they adhere to standard 45-degree angles until it all just gets too difficult for the designer: then they go off in any direction that they please – curves, wiggles and kinks in the line! They’re also pretty sloppily drawn, with lots of examples of parallel routes going out of alignment as they round a curve together.
The less said about the awful, messy station labelling the better, and the blobby interchange symbols that branch out in so many random direction are no more worthy of discussion!
Our rating: Almost embarrassingly bad, especially when it’s presented on the same web page as the superb Paris Region transit map (January 2014, 4.5 stars), which would work for calculating zones just as well – if not much better – than this visual atrocity. Half-a-star and into the Transit Maps Hall of Shame for representing Paris so poorly!
Source: SNCF Transilien website