Gare de Treichville

Abidjan became the coastal terminus of the colonial railway in 1904, and it was the construction of the line north toward Bouaké, Ferkessédougou and eventually Ouagadougou in what is now Burkina Faso that gave the young settlement its reason to grow into a major town rather than remain a minor lagoon port. Gare de Treichville, on Boulevard Philippe Grégoire Yacé south of the lagoon near the port district, is the surviving passenger head of that route, a modest single-storey station building typical of early twentieth-century French colonial railway architecture, with a long platform canopy and adjoining freight yards that once handled the bulk of the colony's export produce moving down from the interior. The line reached Bouaké in 1912, Bobo-Dioulasso in the 1930s and finally Ouagadougou in 1954, making the Abidjan-Ouagadougou railway one of the longest and most significant transport corridors in French West Africa, and Treichville station remained its southern anchor throughout. The station and its yards gave Treichville its industrial character, and the quarter itself takes its name from Marcel Treich-Laplène, the French explorer credited with the early treaties that brought the region under French control. The passenger service, long known as Sitarail, continues to operate international trains between Abidjan and Burkina Faso from the station, though schedules have been irregular in recent years, and the surrounding warehouses and freight sidings remain active as one of the industrial hearts of Treichville, still visibly organised around the railway that created the quarter.