Gare St-Lazare

Paris Saint-Lazare
Terminus
West entrance
Owned by	SNCF
Line(s)	Paris–Le Havre railway
Platforms	27
History
Opened	1837
Electrified	yes
Traffic
Passengers	100 million
Services Preceding station   SNCF   Following station Terminus Intercités Mantes-la-Jolie toward Le Havre or Dieppe Intercités Mantes-la-Jolie toward Cherbourg Intercités Évreux-Normandie toward Trouville-Deauville Terminus Transilien Asnières-sur-Seine toward Ermont-Eaubonne, Gisors or Mantes-la-Jolie Transilien Houilles-Carrières-sur-Seine toward Vernon Terminus Transilien Pont-Cardinet toward Cergy-le-Haut, Saint-Nom-la-Bretèche or Versailles-RD Mantes-la-Jolie toward Rouen-Rive-Droite TER Haute-Normandie Terminus Mantes-la-Jolie toward Serquigny TER Haute-Normandie

Paris Saint-Lazare is one of the six large terminus railway stations of Paris. It is the second busiest station in Paris, after the Gare du Nord. It handles 275,000 passengers each day. The station was designed by architect Juste Lisch, and the maître de l'oeuvre (general contractor) was Eugene Flachat.

The first station at St Lazare was 200 m north-west of its current position, called Embarcadère des Batignolles. The station was opened by Marie-Amélie (wife of Louis-Philippe of France) on 24 August 1837. The first line served was the single track line to Le Pecq. In 1843 St-Lazare was the terminus for three lines; by 1900 this number had tripled. The station had 14 platforms in 1854 after several enlargements, and now has 27 platforms sorted in six destination groups. On 27 April 1924 the inner suburban lines were electrified with 750 V third rail. The same lines were re-electrified at 25 kV overhead wires in the 1960s. On 21 March 2012, a new three levels shopping mall with 80 shops opened inside the passenger hall.

The Gare Saint-Lazare is situated in the 8th arrondissement, in a very dense business and shopping area of Paris.

The Gare Saint-Lazare has been represented in a number of artworks. It attracted artists during the Impressionist period and many of them lived very close to the Gare St-Lazare during the 1870s and 1880s.

Édouard Manet lived close by, at 4 rue de Saint-Pétersbourg. Two years after moving to the area he showed his painting The Railway, (also known as Gare Saint-Lazare) at the Paris Salon in 1874. Painted from the backyard of a friend's house on the nearby rue de Rome, this canvas, now in the National Gallery of Art at Washington D.C., portrays a woman with a small dog and a book as she sits facing us in front of an iron fence; a young girl to her left views the railroad track and steam beyond it. At the time of its first exhibition it was caricatured and the subject of ridicule.

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Wikipedia