La sucrerie du Marquenterre

The town of Rue is located about 10 kms south of the tramway station on the main Paris railway line. Whilst there was never any connection to the tramway from Rue there was a connection in the name of one of the two sugar beet processing factories that were established there in the mid 1800s.

The sucrerie du Marquenterre was a long lived and successful factory which took in sugar beet and processed it into raw sugar, sugar products and, through an associated company, alcohol. Today, in 2018, there is little to be seen although the factory still exists but as a shadow of its former self.

Rue de la Fontaine.lies to the west of the main railway line and is the access road to the SNCF station. It is here that the Société des sucreries du Marquenterre built its factory in 1855 and updated it at various times . In 1916 a distillery was added and in 1934 a new factory on the same site was completed. By 1975 the site had closed. 

It had an extensive standard gauge rail system, connected to the SNCF line and beet was brought in by railway wagon. Indeed, it is possible that when a section of the tramway was being used just for sugar beet transport in the late 1930's some of it may have arrived after transshipment at Rue - possible but unproven!

Motive power for the sidings was provided by two Moyse type 20TDE locotracteurs, both of which were originally petrol-electric and later converted to diesel. They were numbers 28 of 1924 and 69 of 1925. The older one was scrapped on site before an ISR visit in April 2003 and the other, long disused by then, was scrapped around 2005. Today, only a few rails remain embedded in cobbles or hidden in overgrown grass and bushes.