Batteries and storage

The twenty-sixth entry is la station de pompage-turbinage, and the first noun in it is one an English reader is sure of already. That confidence is the trap. Une station in French is any place where something stops or is stationed, and the list of them runs a long way from the railway. Une station-service is a petrol station; une station de ski is a whole resort with its lifts and its hotels; une station thermale is a spa town; une station d’épuration is a sewage works; une station de métro is an underground stop; and la station debout, in a medical report, is simply standing upright. The one thing une station never is, is the building a train pulls into. That is la gare, and no amount of surrounding text will let the other word cover it, which is why the mistake survives so long in a translation. So the entry on this page names a plant and nothing else — a set of machines that pump water uphill at night and let it fall back through turbines by day. A reader who meets « station » and pictures platforms has put a timetable where the pumps are.