France by mistake ordered 2,000 trains that won’t fit in its old platforms

Paris: Cashstrapped France will have to trim back some 1,300 rail platforms at a cost of 50 million euros after realising a brand new fleet of trains are too big to fit its stations, rail operators admitted on Wednesday.

France’s secretary of state for transport, Frederic Cuvillier, called it a “tragically comical”, “mind-boggling” mix-up, blaming a lack of coordination between France’s two state rail bodies, the SNCF and the RFF.

The Societe Nationale des Chemins de Fer (SNCF) and the Reseau Ferre de France (RFF), acknowledged the embarrassing situation in a joint statement on Wednesday after it was revealed by satirical weekly Le Canard Enchaine.

Introducing “wider trains in response to the needs of the public requires us to modernise 1,300 of the 8,700 platforms in the French rail network,” they said.

According to the weekly, the SNCF drew up the specifications for the new-generation trains. But the SNCF’s clever engineers forgot to check on the fact that the space between platforms varies between stations, it said.