SNCF boss Guillaume Pépy announced on Friday, November 16th, that he wants to stop the circulation of locomotives running on diesel in 2035.
SNCF will stop using diesel locomotives by 2030-2035 to replace them with hydrogen-powered trains, SNCF chief executive Guillaume Pepy said Friday.
"We have to get out of the railroad diesel not in 2050 as it was planned but in 2030-2035," Guillaume Pepy told RTL. To do this, the railway company relies on prototypes of hydrogen locomotives developed by Alstom.
"From the beginning of next year we will stop the operation. We will order in the summer, it will probably be prototypes Alstom and we will have these prototypes I hope early 2022 in France, " said Guillaume Pepy.
Although the majority of SNCF traffic is now transported by electrified tracks, diesel locomotives still represent around 20% of the company's fleet.