After many adventures, the new RER B trains finally seem to be on the right track.
Friday evening May 28, Ile-de-France Mobilités (IDFM) presented the design of the future train to user associations.
As has already been the case for Grand Paris Express or T9 trainsets, a consultation will be held in July.
Travelers will be able to choose their favorite from three options.
Nothing fundamental of course, but elements of colors or shapes, exterior and interior.
Users called to vote in July
The first design option, called “Good on my train, quite simply”, offers a hexagonal front window and a more angular nose of the train.
Inside, the seats alternate between light blue and dark blue in the upper room and on the lower level, pink.
The grab bars are gray and the ceiling lights in the form of stars, a bit like in the Ile-de-France, also produced by Bombardier, which has been running since 2009 on several lines in Ile-de-France.
Design 2, “the benevolent train”, offers a rounded front and predominantly white tones.
Inside, in the upper room, more light and dark pink, more blue, and a little red on the lower level.
The grab bars here are darker and the light emanates from rectangular cobblestones.
The users will be able to choose some options of the 146 future RER B which should arrive before the beginning of 2026. Here the design 2. DR
Version 3, "The train well in its time" offers a round front window, but surrounded by black.
Inside, the floor is gray, the grab bars are white, and the seats are apple green, light blue and dark blue as well as red.
The lights are diffused by staggered lines of light.
As for the rest, regardless of the option chosen, the train will now be two-story - today, the RER B has only one - and will offer around 20% more seats, or 342. The greatest promise of this future MI20.
The choice was made not to offer folding seats.
Design 3, called "The train well in its time".
DR
On the color side, we will not be able to escape the blue and white, now the IDFM brand.
A colored strip around the front window will nevertheless vary depending on the destination and light displays are provided above the doors.
It will be air-conditioned, video-monitored and will allow movement from one end of the vehicle to the other (boa trains).
It will also be equipped with semi-automatic piloting in order to be able to reduce the gap between two trains as much as possible, especially in the Châtelet tunnel.
Another specificity: it will be better suited to curving stations.
Read alsoRER B: the (very) long road to modernizing a line with a million users
What to give a little hope to the million users who circulate today in difficult conditions.
“All of this is reassuring.
This means that the design is finally progressing and that we have prospects, rejoices Marc Pélissier of the National Federation of Transport Users (FNAUT).
A few months ago, it was not won.
"
The end of 2025 objective still maintained
In December, after a call for tenders, the contract for the construction of these 146 new RER B trains at 2.56 billion euros was awarded to the consortium bringing together the manufacturer CAF and Bombardier.
But a few days later, Alstom bought Bombardier and has since contested the technical and financial “viability” of this order.
The railway giant has stepped up legal actions to suspend the execution of a contract which notably obliged it to work with its main European competitor, the Spanish CAF. Finally in mid-April, an agreement was reached, without knowing the details. And despite this six-month soap opera, IDFM maintains, at this stage, the delivery target of the first MI20 train "at the end of 2025".
Some already claim that this timetable cannot be met. And for the record, in 2015, Valérie Pécresse, then candidate for the presidency of the regional, had counted in an interview with the JDD on a new RER B ... in 2020: "Our plan will save us eight years on line B" , she had confided. But that was before a global pandemic and its distancing requirements, before facing the complexity of curving stations, a takeover of companies and all these tiles that the RER B has been multiplying for so many years.
