14 DAY TRIAL // The French train operator SNCF has recently received some of the nearly 2,000 new trains it ordered at a cost of €15 billion ($20.5 billion), but realized they are too wide for many of the country's platforms, which means two trains can no longer pass each other on adjacent lines.
Apparently, the costly mistake happened because the national rail operator RFF gave SNCF the wrong dimensions. So far, the blunder has cost the rail operator more than €80 million ($110 million), as 300 of the 1,300 stations deemed too narrow to accommodate the new trains have already been discreetly reconfigured.
Now that the embarrassing mistake was revealed to the public, the train operator was forced to admit that it failed to verify measurements before ordering its new rolling stock. It seems that RFF gave SNFC measurements only for the platforms built less than 30 years ago, overlooking the fact that most of the country’s platforms were built more than 50 years ago, with different dimensions.
“We discovered the problem a bit late, we recognize that and we accept responsibility on that score,” Christophe Piednoel of RFF told the local media.
In a humorous twist, he summed up the problem with a somewhat ill-fitting analogy, “It's as if you have bought a Ferrari that you want to park in your garage, and you realize that your garage isn't exactly the right size to fit a Ferrari because you didn't have a Ferrari before.”
Construction work is now underway to widen all the station platforms that currently aren't fit for the new acquisitions, and the project is set to be complete in 2016, according to The Guardian.
“It can involve chipping a few centimeters off the edge of a platform, or moving an electricity power box located a bit too close to the platform edge,” RFF explained.
Frederic Cuvillier, the French transport secretary, said this was the kind of mistake and inefficiency you find when you separate the rail operators from the train companies, referring to the measure passed by the country's previous government in 1997.
However, this issue will soon be tackled, as the SNCF and RFF will again merge under new reforms slated to be rolled out in June.
Auto Evolution reminds us that SNCF was the company that created the world’s fastest railway network – TGV (Train a Grande Vitesse), which is now used by more than 100 million passengers every year.