Carole Ferry 10:47 a.m., July 14, 2022
While the heat wave settles permanently in France, the trains are full for this week of departure on vacation.
Faced with the heat, the SNCF carefully monitors all of its installations, in order to guarantee smooth journeys for all passages during this heat period.
The heat wave invites itself in the middle of the weekend of departure on vacation.
On the side of the SNCF, the trains are already full, or almost, and the CEO of the company Jean-Pierre Farandou expects a very high attendance in the stations.
It is therefore a high-risk weekend that awaits the SNCF: the crushing heat puts the railway equipment to the test.
“We are very organized, we work with weather forecasts”
"The heat wave is something that we take seriously because there is a dilation effect", informs Jean-Pierre Farandou at the microphone of Europe 1. "It's elementary physics. The rails expand, copper catenaries too. So we are careful not to break the rails or the catenaries."
The SNCF will monitor its facilities very closely throughout this period of high heat.
"We are very organized, we work with weather forecasts for example."
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To overcome the heat wave that is looming this week, the SNCF will have to take some measures, as its CEO explains: "we may have to reduce the speed of certain trains to be less aggressive on the infrastructure, to prevent it from breaking. And I think our customers will understand this well. It is sometimes better to slow hyper trains by fifteen or twenty minutes rather than risk a break in the infrastructure which would be very penalizing for traffic."
For this week of heat wave, rail traffic is very dense throughout France.