Before you buy an expensive sports car, you wanna check if it fits in the garage. The same can be said when you are buying billions of dollars worth of trains, you wanna check whether the rolling stock fits when it comes into the station, into all the stations.
The French National Railway company, the RFF discovered that some of the 2,000 trains ordered from Alstom Bombardier were well, just too wide for the network’s older stations. The train company SNCF reportedly based its orders on the dimensions of the newer, leaner platforms, not the older wider ones.
Apparently the wrong measurements were handed to SNCF by RFF. The mistake was found back in 2012. 300 platforms already had been retrofitted, with another thousand or so to go, costing up to $68,000,000, the company says. Well, at least redoing the platforms will be, quote ”totally useful and necessary”, RFF says and “brings them up to international standards.” So, who is to blame? The current government blames the previous government of course, saying it was absurd to split the train operators from the training network, adding a layer of bureaucracy. It seems what we have here is a failure to communicate.
Jim Boulden cnn, London.
