# New French trains too wide



## CHamilton (May 21, 2014)

Shades of Hope, AR.

Gauging issues hit new French regional trains




> AN emergency programme is underway to adapt platforms across the French railway network after it emerged clearances at many stations are insufficient to accommodate new-generation regional trains, which are due to enter service over the next few years.
> French National Railways (SNCF) and infrastructure manager French Rail Network (RFF) said in a statement on May 20 that 1300 platform faces are being modified at a cost of around €50m to increase clearances for the Alstom Régiolis and Bombardier Régio 2N trains, which are wider than previous generations of rolling stock. A total of 182 Régiolis sets and 159 Régio 2Ns are due to enter service across France by the end of 2016 with more trains expected to follow in the longer-term.
> 
> So far 300 platform faces have been modified and a further 600 will be treated by the end of this year.





French join the list of costly engineering errors


> They measured the new trains, they checked against the latest specs on the book. But engineers at the French railway network forgot to go and measure the actual distance between tracks and platforms -- a mistake that will cost 50 million euros ($68 million) to fix.
> 
> Nearly 1,300 stations are just a few centimeters (inches) too narrow for the 341 new trains that were to be introduced between now and 2016. The problem with older stations was first reported in the French weekly Le Canard Enchaine and confirmed Wednesday by French railway and government officials.


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## oregon pioneer (May 21, 2014)

Can it be true? Are the French even sloppier about details than Americans? Yeah, I knoiw what the stereotypes are...


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## MikefromCrete (May 21, 2014)

It's nice to know that other nations make mistakes, too.


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## TinCan782 (May 21, 2014)

As they say in England, "Mind the gap"!


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## caravanman (May 21, 2014)

Can 'ardly believe it.... Quackers!

Ed


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## Anderson (May 21, 2014)

Wonder if these will be coming to Hope anytime soon...;-)


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## jis (May 21, 2014)

Then again it could be a convoluted French scheme to get funding for fixing 50 year old platforms by forcing the issue, since no French politician will stand for being unable to use a few billion Euros worth of trains for the want of one or two hundred million Euros. 

BTW, car orders that run into thousands are not as uncommon as one might imagine in Europe or in places like China or India. Even when NY MTA orders subway cars they tend to be quite massive orders. NJT Transit ordered over 400 multi-level cars in three tranches. So large orders do happen in the US too. Amtrak has not had one of those in a while. The original Amfleet orders were up there in multi-hundreds.


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## printman2000 (May 21, 2014)

What strikes me is they ordered 2,000 new cars...

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/05/20/us-france-trains-idUSKBN0E021720140520

TWO THOUSAND! And we feel lucky to have our 130 Viewliners ordered.


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## beautifulplanet (May 21, 2014)

printman2000 said:


> What strikes me is they ordered 2,000 new cars...
> 
> http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/05/20/us-france-trains-idUSKBN0E021720140520
> 
> TWO THOUSAND! And we feel lucky to have our 130 Viewliners ordered.


Unfortunately, it appears like Reuters got that wrong.

Unless more orders came in since last December, the total number of firm orders for Bombardier Region 2N is 159 yet. There is an option to increase this number to up to 860 EMUs.

See here:

http://www.bombardier.com/en/media-centre/newsList/details.bombardier-transportation20131223bombardiertosupply30additionalr.bombardiercom.html

When it comes to the Alstom Coradia Polyvalent (called Regionalis by SNCF), just as the International Railway Journal article linked in the very first post says, 216 firm orders are there. There is an option for up to a total of 1000 EMU/hybrid-EMU-DMUs.

So 159 + 216 is not 2000 trains.

And even considering the options, 860 + 1000 is not 2000 trains.

The source of the number 2000 in the Reuters article is not known to me. 

Still 375 new trains is probably more new rolling stock than 130 Viewliner cars.


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## afigg (May 21, 2014)

jis said:


> Then again it could be a convoluted French scheme to get funding for fixing 50 year old platforms by forcing the issue, since no French politician will stand for being unable to use a few billion Euros worth of trains for the want of one or two hundred million Euros.


That is an interesting theory. With the price for fixing all the platforms at only 50 million Euros, not cheap but not a budget buster, not implausible that there was a hidden plan to force the issue to fix a system clearance issue. I know we are in the age of conspiracy theories, but I will take the simple explanation of a bureaucratic blunder caused with 2 large different government agencies failing to fully communicate and everyone thinking that someone else would double check the specs as more plausible. See the platform length problem at Miami Central Station for a recent US example. 

With regards to large equipment orders, WMATA will be buying 728 Series 7000 cars for the DC Metro system over the next 4-5 years. That qualifies as a pretty big order for a US transit agency that is not the MTA.


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## Green Maned Lion (May 21, 2014)

Explain to me, please, why my posts are deleted to the left and to the right, but Frisky's obnoxious, insulting, blatantly racist posts are left alone?

Nevermind. You'll just delete this one, too. Why do I post here?


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## lo2e (May 22, 2014)

GML, if you have an issue with someone else's post, hit the "Report" button in that post and a moderator will take a look at it. If someone else has a problem with your post, they are doing the same.

Back on topic: I found the following quote from this article very disturbing:



> In the worst cases it has discovered two trains can no longer pass each other on adjacent lines.


How in the world does nobody catch THIS?


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## printman2000 (May 22, 2014)

beautifulplanet said:


> Unfortunately, it appears like Reuters got that wrong.
> Unless more orders came in since last December, the total number of firm orders for Bombardier Region 2N is 159 yet. There is an option to increase this number to up to 860 EMUs.
> 
> See here:
> ...


Saw on CBS this morning, they also used the 2,000 number when reporting about this. Not saying that it is right, just FYI.


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## cirdan (May 22, 2014)

beautifulplanet said:


> printman2000 said:
> 
> 
> > What strikes me is they ordered 2,000 new cars...
> ...


Are you sure you're not confusing cars with trains?


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## Ispolkom (May 22, 2014)

afigg said:


> I will take the simple explanation of a bureaucratic blunder caused with 2 large different government agencies failing to fully communicate and everyone thinking that someone else would double check the specs as more plausible. See the platform length problem at Miami Central Station for a recent US example.


Absolutely. This is another situation best explained by Hanlon's Razor: _Never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity._ Those of us who work in government soon learn that darn few of our colleagues just are up to carrying out a conspiracy competently. Your example is especially pertinent to me, since Mrs. Ispolkom and I are flying to Miami on Saturday to take the Sunday Silver Meteor. We had planned to stay at the Sheraton across the street from Miami Central Station, but changed reservations when I realized that Amtrak would still be at the old station.


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## cirdan (May 22, 2014)

afigg said:


> jis said:
> 
> 
> > Then again it could be a convoluted French scheme to get funding for fixing 50 year old platforms by forcing the issue, since no French politician will stand for being unable to use a few billion Euros worth of trains for the want of one or two hundred million Euros.
> ...


From what I've heard is much more mundane than that.

In the past, a long time ago, SNCF was one monolithic company. If they wanted new trains, the operating department would go and talk to the infrafrustructure department, who would sit across the corridor or at most a floor or two away. They would look at the infrastructure changes needed to accomodate new trains and look at who would pick up the costs. It was all one company back then so cost allocation was just an internal exercise. Sometimes it was also a trick to make some investment appear cheaper than it was as there were often means to spread costs around in a away that nobody could really follow. Similarly stuff they didn't want could be inflated by suddenly having to pay for stuff that would have to have been done anway. That's the way government works (cue discussions on this forum about cost llocation of dining on Amtrak's LD trains etc).

Today, RFF and SNCF are two separate bodies. So The SNCF people have to talk to the RFF people. They also have strictly separate budgets so they can't just say, as they used to, we'll reshuffle some of the money from this pot into that pot. So RFF would have taken out their calculators and said, ah, this is tricky, we don't have the budget. But they would have said, I see this is important, we'll go to the government and ask for this. And they would go to the government and ask for it and the government would say, the budget is done for this year and we can wriggle, but we'll let you have the money next year or the year after. And somebody would have forgotten to go back and communicate that and the train gets delivered ahead of the infrastructure. Or maybe not even that. It could be they cleared the line on which the new trains will be initially but somebody in the press got hold of the fact that the other lines it will later also be used on are not yet adapted, and then screams fail the way the press are wont to do.

Many rural stations in France have low platforms, so I can't really see slightly wider trains not fitting. Methinks this is a constructed issue.


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## jis (May 22, 2014)

cirdan said:


> Many rural stations in France have low platforms, so I can't really see slightly wider trains not fitting. Methinks this is a constructed issue.


I suspect you are correct for a majority of the stations that allegedly require attention. Otherwise the bill would have been way larger than 80 million Euros.

I think the business about track center problem is mostly nonsense,except maybe in some few locations of tight clearance. Apparently it is not huge enough again to require any significant budget to fix.

But it sure makes a good headline and makes everyone in US feel quite smug. So everyone is happy, few platforms that needed fixing get fixed. The French have 2000 new cars in 300+ new 6 car articulated trains, and we in US are happy that others make mistakes too, and still we have no more cars for any more trains. That's life.


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## CHamilton (May 22, 2014)

cirdan is correct. Via NPR:



> But officials say there was a disconnect between RFF, France's rail operator, and SNCF, the company that runs its trains, and now some 1,300 platforms must be modified.
> 
> France 24 explains:
> 
> ...


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## beautifulplanet (May 22, 2014)

cirdan said:


> Are you sure you're not confusing cars with trains?


In order to try to make it clear again,

(this might be wrong, as it is just as far as I know, see sources mentioned above):

- 159 Bombardier OMNEO (called Regio2N by SNCF) trains (not cars) have been firmly ordered, with an option to increase the total number to 860 trains (not cars)

- 216 Alstom Coradia Polyvalent (called Regiolis by SNCF) trains (not cars) have been firmly ordered, with an option to increase the total number to 1,000 trains (not cars)

If these numbers are wrong, please post a correction here - I would be glad to find out what the actual currnet numbers are then.



> Saw on CBS this morning, they also used the 2,000 number when reporting about this. Not saying that it is right, just FYI.


In the reporting, a mix-up regarding the size of the orders of new rolling stock seems to be quite common.

Then in addition, it seems like there might be a cultural difference, as on the North American continent it might be quite common to specify the order of new rolling stock in terms of cars, while it would be trains in Europe, at least in the case of EMUs (and hybrid EMUs/DMUs) here, which order as a trainset with a fixed number of cars anyway.

When visiting the Reuters news article linked above, it seems like it talks of 2,000 trains, not cars:



> Freunch rail company orders 2,000 trains too wide for platforms
> 
> PARIS Tue May 20, 2014 4:57pm EDT
> (Reuters) - France's national rail company SNCF said on Tuesday it had ordered 2,000 trains for an expanded regional network that are too wide for many station platforms, entailing costly repairs.




Even very renowned news organizations got it wrong, f.e. the BBC, writing about 2,000 trains:

French red faces over trains that are 'too wide'

see here: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-27497727

The following article by The Telegraph at least mentions the topic of the different numbers of trains, while still using the seemingly completely unfounded number of 2,000 in the headline (even 1,860 is not equal 2,000)...

French rail company order 2,000 trains too wide for platforms

by Henry Samuel, Paris

10:37AM BST 21 May 2014

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/10845789/French-rail-company-order-2000-trains-too-wide-for-platforms.html

It seems like The Guardian was one of the few media outlets to completely resist the urge to use this "2,000" number of trains, though so many other media outlets used it. Here is a quote of a paragraph on the topic of the number of trains:



> SNCF said only 341 trains – 182 from Alstom and 159 from Bombardier – were affected.
> 
> However, satirical news magazine Le Canard Enchainé insisted 1,000 of the trains had been ordered from Alstom and 860 from Bombardier, making a total of 1,860 trains that were too wide for many of the stations they are to service.


See:

French railway operator SNCF orders hundreds of new trains that are too big

by Kim Willsher in Paris

Wednesday 21 May 2014 12.03 BST

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/21/french-railway-operator-sncf-orders-trains-too-big

So it seems clear that the Le Canard Enchainé magazine also counted the options, which are not firm orders at all, and which possibly also might never be fully exercised (hence the name "option"  ) ...

In case this posting contains misinformation, please post corrections...


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## beautifulplanet (May 22, 2014)

In order to provide an actual number of train cars ordered, though this is no easy enterprise, here we go (once again no guarantee everything is 100% correct)... 

First, the Alstom Regiolis

- region of France that ordered it, number of cars per EMU/hybrid-EMU-DMU train, and number of trains ordered:

Alsace, 6 trains wtih 4 cars each, 18 trains with 6 cars each = 132 cars

Aquitaine, 22 trains with 4 cars each = 88 cars

Auvergne, 12 trains with 4 cars each = 48 cars

Basse-Normandie, 15 trains with 6 cars each = 90 cars

Franche-Comté, 7 trains with 4 cars each = 28 cars

Haute-Normandie, 10 trains with 4 cars each = 40 cars

Intercités (trainsets intended to replace Corail trains on Intercite services, thus not included in SNCF's calculation above), 34 trains with 6 cars each = 204 cars

Lorraine, 10 trains with 4 cars each = 40 cars

Midi-Pyrénées, 25 cars with 4 cars each = 100 cars

PACA, 10 trains with 4 cars each = 40 cars

Pays de la Loire, 20 trains with 4 cars each = 80 cars

Picardie, 17 trains with 6 cars each = 102 cars

Poitou-Charentes, 10 trains with 4 cars each = 40 cars

total 1,032 Alstom Regiolis cars so far 

Continuing with the Bombardier Regio2N:

Aquitaine, 24 trains with 6 cars each = 144 cars

Bretagne, 7 trains with 6 cars each, 10 trains with 8 cars each = 42 cars

Centre, 14 trains with 8 cars each = 112 cars

Ile-de-France, 48 trains with 8 cars each = 384 cars

Midi-Pyrenees, 10 trains with 6 cars each = 60 cars

Nord-Pas-de-Calais, 18 trains with 7 cars each = 126 cars

Pays de la Loire, 13 trains with 8 cars each = 104 cars

Picardie, 7 trains with 10 cars each = 70 cars

Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, 16 trains with 8 cars each = 128 cars

Rhône-Alpes, 40 trains with 6 cars each = 240 cars

total 1,410 Bombardier Regio2N cars.

1,032 + 1,410 = 2,442 new cars in total

Hope this is helpful...


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## George Harris (May 22, 2014)

> _Never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity_.


Yea and verily. I can think of an almost endless list of examples of this many years of working in public transportation projects. There are many of these examples that are also examples of the thought that "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing." That is, statements made with profond assurance by people who know just enouigh to sound knowledgeble to management types that have no technical knowledge that result in boneheaded decisions that waste money, effort, and time while missing the worthwhile.

As to the subject at hand: The Bombardier press release is a rather typical don't break your arm while patting yourself on the back self serving press release.

First: The press release is dated December 2013 and is to announce the additon of 30 trainsets to a previous order, bringing "the total number of Regio 2N trains ordered to date up to 159". Note that this is train sets, not cars.

Bombardier was very proud on the additional width of the vehicle. Witness:



> The train with an extra-wide carbody offers improved accessibility thanks to wide doors, gangways and corridors, large vestibules and step-free entrances from platform heights of 550 mm.


These appear to be bi-level cars with a depressed lower floor, as 550 mm (21 3/4 inches) definitely is lower than a floor above wheel level would be. For that we would be looking at something in the range of 1250 to 1300 mm (around 49 to 51 inches) for platform height.

The newer station platforms being at a greater offset from the track is strange indeed. They must not have gap requirements in the range of the US ADA, as if that were the case, the newer platfroms would result in a non-compliant gap to the older vehicles. (ADA say horizontal gap no more than 3 inches, vertical difference less than 5/8 inch.)

No matter what, however, 2000 vehicles is a gross exaggeration, as a 10 car trainset is referred to as an extra long version, sugggesting that many (most? all?) of these trainsets are shorter than 10 cars. By the way, the Reuters article also says "trains" not cars.

The press release mentions that there are nine regional opeators, so it could be that the regions in the inital order could clear the cars and that one or more of the regions that tacked themselves on had platforms that could not clear the cars. It could also be, given normal accuracy of the press, that it was not could not clear in the sense of would impact the platform but instead was could not clear in the sense that the clearance was less than sufficient to allow for normal car bounce and sway. This latter is used to develop a minimum necessary clearance zone that is called the "dynamic outlne" or "kinematic envelope"


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