Recycling: the largest railway dismantling plant in France inaugurated in Seine-Maritime

It is the largest installation of its kind in France. On a 15 hectare site owned by the Baudelet Environment group, the Grémonville railway dismantling plant, in Seine-Maritime, was inaugurated on Tuesday, October 12. SNCF intends to send 900 TER wagons or locomotives there, and up to 1,300 TGV over the next ten years.

The first TER trains, still in the colors of the old regions, but also TGVs which were still circulating recently on the Paris-Lyon line, are already filling the warehouses. Conveyed by the SNCF to a storage station next to the buildings, it is then the factory teams who take charge of them. “It is up to us to repatriate the trains inside our site, the trains pass behind the building and start to enter here“, explains Arnaud Tual, the director of the site.

The first step in the process is to dismantle the floors and seats inside the cars. A phase called “green cleaning”, which precedes the phase of asbestos removal.

Most of these trains do indeed contain asbestos, which often takes the form of a black powder in the ceilings. Another specialized company, the Snadec group (National Society for Decontamination), works in a confined hangar on the site, using sandblasting machines.

Once this stage is completed, the wagon approaches its true end of life. “The last step when it has been removed from asbestos, we can see the metal that is bare, it has been cleaned, so it will be cut“, summarizes Arnaud Tual. Then enter the dance a shovel with a huge clamp.”It is a clamp equipped with a shear, which allows to shear the metal part, overall the entire cauldron, and then the bogies which will also be cut by the operators.“, details the director of the site.

All reusable parts or parts are collected by SNCF. “Axles of bogies, motors, transformers, pantographs, electronic drawers“, details Alain Maucourt, responsible for dismantling equipment written off from SNCF.

“This recovery is massive and a source of savings for our company.”

Alain Maucourt, responsible for dismantling equipment written off from SNCF

to franceinfo

As for the aluminum or stainless steel that make up the train bodies, they are sold to steelworks. This represents around 60,000 tonnes of steel per year, recovered from the various train dismantling sites. The final recycling rate then varies from 92 to 98% depending on the type of train. Before giving way to new generation trains on which SNCF relies.