Bordeaux Saint-Jean

This guide to Gare Saint-Jean in Bordeaux opens in the summer of 1940, with a workman dangling from ropes above the platforms to brush pale blue paint over sheet after sheet of glass, hiding the roof from German bombers hunting rail junctions. It then reaches back to 1898, when engineer Louis Choron and architect Marius Toudoire finished a canopy so vast it briefly ranked among the largest in the world, built by the same firm behind Bordeaux's first iron rail bridge. Stand beneath the ironwork and picture it dimmed to the color of dusk at noon, pane by pane.