Et, in the edition of May 12, 1983, the RER B finally entered The world… The complete abbreviation we mean, these four letters which today carry around in them, with a crash, strong images: crowded trains, harassed passengers, pale mornings, compromised evenings, but also the thousand faces of these populations of the peripheries , France of flags and estates, household staff and middle managers.
Before this date of May 12, 1983, the newspaper followed the gestation of this transport of a new era, half-train, half-metro. In 1961, the expression “regional express network” appeared in the columns, on the occasion of the first pickaxe of the huge construction site. Its generic acronym, RER (with midpoints, please, like so many stations), followed the following year.
It was going to flourish, taking the definitive spelling of RER (now spelled out in one go like a breeze), with all its variations of lines, from A to E. It became the symbol of a way of life . With a special mention for line B, the most popular, also the most contrasting, serving on a north-south axis, the jet-lagueurs of Roissy, the bourgeois of Sceaux or the immigrant populations of the 9-3.
To the point that director Alice Diop, in We, a documentary released on February 16, took this line as a red thread to tell “his” suburbs. As recalled, on that same February 17, a long article in the World that Emeline Cazi dedicated to its renovation, the RER B has also become the symbol of the infernal daily life of many Ile-de-France residents. Roll the galley…
bearer of hope
However, in its infancy, the one which was also called “express metro” was the bearer of hope even before being so for commuters. He was overloaded with promises of a better life, of arriving on time at work in the early morning, without traffic jams or shouting matches from the boss, of returning serenely in the evening to the mason’s house or the family HLM. The newspaper followed assiduously – and impatiently – the progress of the work, even if the drill was – already – showing delays… On December 8, 1977, line A and line B met at the Châtelet-Les Halles interconnection, marking the official birth certificate of the RER. The world greeted with great pomp and several days during this new stage of modernity.
But, even after this inauguration, the journalists of the august daily persevered in calling the RER B “line of Seals”, the old name of the southern branch of the new axis. Refusal of technocratic rigmarole or nostalgia for Simenon’s Paris? We do not know. On April 19, 1978, Marie-Christine Robert finally abandoned this backward-looking formula to “line B of the RER”.
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