Chartres Transportation

Few VTers seem to use a car to travel. There are advantages that we have detailed in various Intros. One of the difficulties is admittedly the cost and strain of ditching the car. As time progresses ther is increasing traffic and many small and mid-size cities have created insufficient space. We have been fortunate in Chartres as there are two open air spaces devoted to meter parking, one near the Cathedral in the Pl. Chatelet and the other at the town center (Pl. des Epars). We have used the latter because we were staying at the Hotel Grand Monarque which is close by or because we were next headed out of town immediately south of the Place. Up the two Blvds. (Resistance and Viollette) in the picture is the fine old Post Office mentioned by another VT traveller.

Moving around this historic town is a delight. This specialised coach is used by tourists now to tour the city. There are only two types, and you can see the other type run by the tourist office.
I think, for the old, this is ideal. But, if you are old but young like me, i recommend you walk the town. It is not very big, and it is more fun.

The trip from Paris to Chartres takes 1hour 12 minutes. You leave from Montparnasse train station, when you arrive in Chartres it only takes 5 minutes to walk up the hill to the Cathedral.

There is no left luggage at the station. We had our suitcases on wheels and wheeled them into a corner of the Cathedral, they were still there when we returned.

As of June 2004 the train fare is 23.60 Euros for a roundtrip. Trains leave nearly every hour.

The best way to get to Chartres from Paris is to take the train.

Trains leave approximately every hour from the Gare Montparnasse station in Paris. It takes about 75 minutes on the train to reach Chartres. I believe that our tickets cost around 12 euros each way (you should just purchase a round-trip ticket).

Once you arrive at the train station in Chartres, it's a 5-10 minute walk to the Cathedral. Walk east from the station and you'll see the Cathedral rising above the other buildings.

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Trains leave on an almost hourly basis from Gare Montparnasse. There are 2 types of tracks -- ones that you enter through a gate like the metro and ones where you must remember to "compost" your ticket in the orange machine. If you have a paper ticket and are faced with a gate just seek out the information guy and he will give you a metro-type ticket to use. In anycase COMPOST!!!

Although my first and, so far, only, trip to Chartres was on a tour bus, it is very easily done by train from Gare Montparnasse in Paris. The trains run frequently and take a little over an hour. The walk to the cathedral is uphill, but brief.
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This picture is from where our tour bus left us off in 1992. And I can see now from my recent revisit that it was just in front of the train station :))))

Taking the train to Chartres is quite easy and not that expensive. The journey takes one hour to cover the distance of 88km from Paris.