Robot-Controlled Trains For Paris Metro

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30880, 13 October 1965, Page 14

Robot-Controlled Trains For Paris Metro

Oi.Z.P.A.-Reuter) PARIS. As part of a move to encourage workers to live outside the capital, the Metro railway system in Paris is to be equipped with robot-controlled underground trains travelling at 60 miles an hbur. > •-

A radical reorganisation of the Metro has never taken place, but it has already been first in the field with trains on rubber tyres—and now it is going ahead with further research. Engineers are already at work with the express Metro which, when it is completed in 1969, will serve the outer suburbs of Paris on two lines crossing the city from east to west and north to south. Some of the trains, which will make fewer stops than normal on the underground, will run on lines already existing. The rest will pass through deep tunnels running far below other underground lines. A spokesman explained that the Paris subsoil is already so honeycombed with railways and sewers that new lines have to be dug deep.

The new lines should encourage people to live out of town and the city authorities, working in close co-operation with the Metro, are building more houses in the areas the trains will serve. Experimental Run Paris commuters have already had their first ride in a train driven by remote control. The experimental run was not announced in advance and nobody noticed the difference.

The automatic train is controlled by electrical impulses from a wire laid out along the track. But, although it accelerates, brakes and stops of its own accord, the driver remains at the controls and it is he who gives the signal to start the train at each station.

By fixing and maintaining its own time schedule, the driverless train takes a load off the driver’s shoulders, permitting him to concentrate on safety and efficient running. Trials have also taken place of an overhead monorail system on an experimental line at Chateau-Neuf-sur-Loire. Behind this scheme is a consortium of French firms, including the State-owned Renault car factory.

It consists of an aluminium carriage similar to an airliner’s fuselage, suspended from a hollow overhead rail, which runs silently on a rubber-tyred bogey at speeds of up to 60 miles an hour.

Cushion of Air Close on the heels of the monorail comes the new “aerotrain” project for a 125 miles an hour passenger car running on a cushion of air. The State-aided Aerotrain Study Company announced recently that trials are to be carried out before the end of the year on an experimental track now under construction outside Paris.

The company says that the train, which will be lifted off the ground by two propellers 6ft long, may reach speeds of up to 250 miles an hour when out of the experimental stage. The first model, a 30ft long cabin holding a driver, engineer and four passengers, will run on a concrete track shaped like an inverted "T.” The stem in the middle will prevent side-ways movement and the flanges at the edge form the base for the aircushion. Metro officials said they

were awaiting developments before considering the use of the aerotrain on the underground. Progress Other more immediate projects include an extension of the rubber-tyre trains beyond the one crowded line on which they operate at present France claims the credit for inventing these rubbertyred trains and French engineers are now helping to install a similar system in Montreal, Canada. The march of progress will soon also eliminate the prewar Paris buses with open platforms at the rear. Plans for a double-decker service were studied and rejected because of the number of low bridges in the Paris area and an order has now been given for 500 new buses—without the open rear platform. “We were sorry about this, as we felt these buses have become something of a tourist attraction,” said one official, “but we have to keep up to date.”