The national French railway operator SNCF is going to 2023 to Commission an Autonomous high-speed TGV trains, FranceInfo the Agency reports citing official sources. Testing of so-called “train-the drones” is scheduled for 2019, according to the same publication.
New French high-speed trains will be equipped with special sensors, which will mark the obstacles on the lines, and if necessary stop the train. Automated TGV trains will be able to accelerate to speeds in excess of 300 kilometers per hour. Monitoring is planned to be implemented remotely, but on Board to increase the level of security will always be conductors, in order to take emergency measures.
SNCF President Guillaume Pepi in an interview with the publisher of Le Figaro, said that if the project is successful, then SNCF will be the world’s first train operator that will run the automated high-speed trains.
Mathieu Chabanel, assistant Director of SNCF, in turn, in an interview FranceInfo compared the automated train with the autopilot systems used on commercial Airliners.
“In the cockpit there is always a pilot, but also provides automatic control liner”, — commented on Chabanel.
The introduction of automated trains, in the opinion of the operator, the SNCF will increase the speed and the frequency of TGV trains. And in particular in the vicinity of Paris, where the TGV often overlap with numerous local and regional rail lines. The operator believes that implementation of an automated road system will contribute to increase the number of trips between Paris and Lyon by 25 percent.
France by 2023, will begin using high-speed Autonomous trains
Nikolai Khizhnyak