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Genève-Cornavin railway station

Buildings and structures in GenevaLyon–Geneva railwayRailway stations in the canton of GenevaRailway stations opened in 1858Swiss Federal Railways stations
Transport in Geneva
Cornavin Mars 2019
Cornavin Mars 2019

Geneva railway station (French: Gare de Genève), also known as Geneva Cornavin railway station, is Geneva's main train station, located in the centre of the city. The immediate area surrounding it is known as Cornavin; both names can be used interchangeably. The third largest train station in Switzerland by passenger numbers, with 116,000 users on average per working day (figures before Léman Express network began full operation), it sees over 400 train departures every day from its eight through-platforms. Platforms 7 and 8 have French and Swiss border controls. Long distance and regional express trains leave for France without making any stops in Switzerland. Another reason to separate the tracks is the different electrical standards of the relevant railway system on either side. The French system uses 25 kV at 50 Hz AC, but the Swiss system uses 15 kV AC at 16.7 Hz. The station connects to one Swiss mainline, the Lausanne–Geneva line, which links the city with the rest of Switzerland, to the east. Many long-distance trains from this line continue to and terminate at the airport, 6 minutes away. There is also significant traffic to France westwards along the Lyon-Geneva line, which, for the first few kilometres, runs as a single track line alongside the double-track line to the airport. Traffic to France includes long-distance TGVs to Paris and southern France and regional trains to Lyon via Bellegarde. Cornavin is also the hub of the Léman Express network, with six routes in service. Many of these routes travel over the newly-opened CEVA, which leads to Annemasse.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article Genève-Cornavin railway station (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors, Images).

Genève-Cornavin railway station
Aile Ouest, Geneva Grottes et Saint-Gervais

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N 46.210216944444 ° E 6.1424469444444 °
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Aile Ouest
1201 Geneva, Grottes et Saint-Gervais
Geneva, Switzerland
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Cornavin Mars 2019
Cornavin Mars 2019
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Brunswick Monument
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The Brunswick Monument is a mausoleum built in 1879 in the Jardin des Alpes in Geneva, Switzerland to commemorate the life of Charles II, Duke of Brunswick (1804–1873). He bequeathed his fortune to the city of Geneva in exchange for a monument to be built in his name, specifying that it be a replica of the Scaliger Tombs in Verona, Italy. The Grand Théâtre de Genève, opened in 1879, was built with the legacy.In his will drawn up on 5 March 1871, Charles left his entire estate to the city of Geneva with a single stipulation; that a mausoleum be built for him in Geneva "in a prominent position and worthy", that it should feature statues of his father, Frederick William, and his grandfather, Charles William Ferdinand, and that it should imitate the style of the 14th century Scaliger Tombs in Verona. Accordingly, a design was chosen by the Swiss architect Jean Franel. Sited on the Quai du Mont-Blanc, it is built in three storeys of white marble with a hexagonal canopy over a sarcophagus bearing a recumbent figure of the duke. At the projecting corners are marble statues of six notable ancestors of the House of Guelph by various sculptors, and a bronze equestrian statue of Duke William by the French sculptor Auguste Cain was originally mounted at the top of the spire. The monument stands on a platform 65 meters long and 25 meters wide and is guarded by marble chimeras and lions, also by Cain. The monument was unveiled on 14 October 1879; however, earthquake damage resulted in the removal of the equestrian statue to an adjacent plinth in 1883 and the top of the spire was rebuilt with a crown in 1890. The duke's estate amounted to 24 million Swiss Francs, two million of which were expended on the monument, the remainder was spent on a number of new public buildings, for example the Grand Théâtre.

Bâtiment des Forces motrices
Bâtiment des Forces motrices

The Bâtiment des Forces motrices (BFM), French for "Power plant building", is the power house of a former hydro power plant and waterworks in Geneva called Usine des Forces Motrices, later Usine des Forces Motrices de la Coulouvrenière. The structure is positioned near the point where the River Rhône flows out of Lake Geneva towards Lyon. It was created between 1883 and 1892 (and subjected to subsequent improvements) to exploit the flow of the river to provide water pressure to feed the city's water supply and a hydraulic power network. Furthermore, the weir of the structure was designed to regulate the level of the lake. The structure lost its original function as a power source in 1963, but it nevertheless continued to house pumping equipment to service Geneva's drinking water supply till 1988. The weir of the power plant was used some more years till it was taken over by the Barrage du Seujet (Seujet barrage) in 1995, which is located approximately fifty meters downstream from the BFM. Towards the end of the twentieth century the BFM was converted into an entertainment venue, reopening in 1997 as an opera house / concert hall designed by the architect Bernard Picenni in association with the acoustician Peutz and the scenographer dUCKS scéno. At the time when the project was defined as a "power plant" there was no automatic correlation between a "power plant" and a public electricity supply. The idea in 1882 was to feed power in the form of pressurized water to local manufacturing businesses, who could use it to operate their own powered machinery, which might indeed include generators. Another objective involved using the pumped water to feed the reservoirs of the public drinking water supply. However, in 1887 electricity generation started in a building nearby the BFM, where generators were driven by pressurized water supplied from the BFM. The hydraulic power network needed a pressure valve to avoid the damage from excessive pressure within the network which was located beside the BFM and which was the precursor to Geneva's Jet d'Eau (fountain).