Oops! New French Trains Too Wide For Platforms

The French are famous for their fast and sleek high speed trains, and rightly so. These marvels of engineering provide them with a sense of pride and accomplishment. However, it seems when they separate who builds the trains from who actually operates them, there can be a problem. French train operator SNCF has now discovered that 2,000 new trains that it ordered at a cost of 15 billion euros ($20.5 billion US) are going to be just a bit too wide for many of the French regional platforms. The platform edges are too close to the tracks in some stations which means the trains cannot get in. It also means that on parallel tracks when trains are going in opposite directions, to put it mildly, they are not going to miss each other.

This appears to be quite an embarrassing blunder that has so far cost the rail operator the equivalent of over 68 million dollars and the cost is likely to rise even further. Construction work has already started to reconfigure a bunch of the station platforms but officials say that there are still about 1,000 more platforms that will have to be adjusted.

The error seems to have happened because the national rail operator RFF gave the wrong dimensions to train company SNCF. Apparently they measured platforms built less than 30 years ago, overlooking the fact that many of France's regional platforms were built more than 50 years ago when trains were just a wee bit slimmer. That wee bit makes the platform edges too close to the tracks in some stations which means the trains cannot get in. A spokesman for the RFF confirmed they had "discovered the problem a bit late".