“We will have to be patient.” After the breakdown of metro B in Rennes on January 3, the resumption of the service will not take place before “a long time of the order of a quarter”, announced the mayor of Rennes Nathalie Appéré this Tuesday, January 9 during a press conference.
Technical analyzes carried out on the train which had triggered the system’s safety at the beginning of the month showed “that a mechanical part was broken on this particular train”, explained Stéphane Bayon de Noyer, director of the manufacturer’s VAL system. Siemens which built the brand new line, inaugurated in the fall of 2022. This part is located on the train bogies, located under the bodies and on which the wheels are located.
The decision was therefore made to replace the defective part “on all the bogies of the 25 trains”, or 100 bogies, indicated Stéphane Bayon de Noyer. The operation, which requires resupply of equipment and dismantling of bogies, will therefore take time. “All of these operations will be carried out in Rennes,” specifies the manufacturer.
Between now and the hoped-for return to service in the spring, the metropolis’ transport network will be reorganized to offer a fallback solution to the 110,000 daily travelers on line B of the metro. Initially, the relay bus line set up during the outage at the end of 2023 was reactivated, before a reorganization of the network planned for February to better distribute resources and drivers, explained the operator Keolis.
Line B of the Rennes metro had already been interrupted for more than a month from November 18 to December 21, 2023 after a fire in an electrical supply station. No connection has been made between the two incidents at this time.
