There is a portable television, a refrigerator and a razor that somehow resembles the trains of the Mexico City Metro. The similarity could be because all these objects have the same parent: roger tallon.
This Frenchman is responsible for the fact that the Mexican subway train has that slightly convex peaked finish in the driver’s cabin; the metal frame of the windshield; the shape of the doors, seats and windows; the red emergency lever; ceiling fans; and even probably the color orange.
DF Metro, Roger Tallon’s first job in transportation
The Mexico City Metro was his first job in transportation design. It was commissioned by Brissonneu et Lotz and Alsthom, who together had been contracted by the Mexican government to provide them with cars for their first subway.
The condition that the Mexicans placed on the French was that the vehicles look modern and their image break with the daily life of the capital, which is why Roger fit well in the mission.
Televisions and toothbrushes… his works before the Metro
Tallon had the experience of having run graphic communication for Caterpillar, Du Pont; be a professor at the Higher School of Applied Arts in France; having founded the design school at the National School of Decorative Arts; etc.
But he also made the most disparate objects, such as the Montmartre funicular, ski boots, toothbrushes, dishes, typewriters, cameras and the famous French portable Teleavia P11 television. In short, he was the precursor of the movement of industrial aesthetics.
Roger Tallon created the MP-68 for Mexico City
With this previous background, he received the order to design his first subway train to Mexico, a country 9,184 kilometers away from his own, which he had never visited and about which he knew little. They only ordered him that that vehicle should be created modern so that it would break visually with everything that was then in the Mexican capital, and he did so.
Roger Tallon thus created the MP-68 for Mexico City, a convoy technologically similar to the MP-59 in France, but with a design, shall we say, with more modern lines for the time.
Tallon trains continue to run in Mexico City
Once the tests were finished, the MP-68 was placed on a track made specifically for this train at the Base d’essais in Sucy. The following is a photograph of that moment.
As we all know, the Mexico City Metro was inaugurated on September 4, 1969, the modern MP-68s were received by the people with applause at each station. But no one asked who had designed those convoys.