The maintenance problems that led to accidents such as that of Brétigny in 2013 "persist" at the SNCF, says Le Parisien Tuesday on the basis of a partial and confidential report of the railway gendarme EPSF, the SNCF emphasizing on the contrary an improvement of security for three years. By carrying out checks themselves along the railways, the EPSF investigators found "dozens of anomalies", some of which could affect safety, which were not included in the SNCF reports even when the last round of The inspection went back a week, the newspaper reports in an online article.
The Parisian evokes ribs (metal parts linking two rails) with loose or missing bolts - an element that played a vital role in the derailment of the train Intercités Paris-Limoges to Brétigny-sur-Orge (Essonne) which had made seven dead and more than 30 wounded on July 12, 2013. The report of the Public Railway Safety Establishment (EPSF), covering the technical audit of 14,000 km of the SNCF network (which has 30,000 in total), also points "several hundred anomalies that "have not been dealt with on time".
"It is not possible to be sure that the anomalies identified during the surveillance operations have been processed," the report's authors note. On Tuesday evening, the audit report was not available on the EPSF website and no manager could be reached.
"There have never been so many controls," says SNCF
SNCF confirmed the content of the technical audit report, while minimizing the conclusions drawn by the daily newspaper. "If the EPSF had noted serious situations or serious discrepancies, it has the obligation to seek immediate precautionary measures, which is not the case," said one official. "To judge the state of security, we must look at the number of remarkable safety accidents reported by the EPSF, which has decreased by 30% in three years," said the same source.
Since Brétigny, "the control and security have been completely overhauled, including the launch of several monitoring trains bardés electronic sensors, called Surveil, who crisscross the network day and night to check the integrity of the network," added this manager. According to him, "there have never been so many controls, which is a good thing".