Finished playing. This Monday the European Metropolis of Lille (MEL) announced that it was putting an end to the mediation initiated with Alstom with the aim of resolving the delay in delivery of the new Lille metro trains. “Given Alstom’s persistent inability to fulfill its obligations”, the community has entrusted the matter to the courts, we learned from the MEL.
It was in 2012 that the railway equipment manufacturer Alstom won the contract to double the capacity of metro trains in the Lille metropolis. The project was to replace the old 26m trains with new trains, 52m long. For 266 million euros at the time, Alstom committed to finishing the job by January 2016 by delivering 27 trainsets and an operational system. The subtlety is that the Lille metro is automatic and that the designer of the original system was not Alstom.
The metro will not be ready for the 2024 Olympics
The industrialist selected by the MEL in 2012 for this project found himself facing a more arduous task than he had envisaged. It is the development of the automatic pilot system of the trains which poses a problem for Alstom. “The MEL notes the new failure of the tests to validate the new automatic pilot of the Lille metro, now showing a foreseeable delay of at least ten years,” deplores the institution.
An expertise was launched in 2018 at the initiative of the MEL. Mediation followed in 2019, then an amendment in 2020 and again mediation in 2022. Alstom first promised delivery of the site for April 2023. Failure. Alstom then swore that it would be completed for the 2024 Olympics. This will not be the case, the last tests of the autopilot, last September, having failed to qualify the system. “On the operational level, Alstom’s failures make it impossible to put into service before at best the beginning of 2026,” assures the MEL.
The metropolis deplores damage whose amount is increasing “disproportionately”. Worse, the community fears a disruption in the continuity of the public transport service “due to the obsolescence of the 26-meter VAL trains which will begin in August 2025”. This is all the more intolerable for the MEL since Alstom “refused any form of compensation” even though the company recognizes its responsibility for the delay of the program.
In the coming days, the metropolis will “take several actions to court” against Alstom, so that the company “fulfills its obligations in full”, ensures “the continuity of the metro service” and takes out the checkbook to compensate for the damages suffered.