Toulouse’s Tisséo is the first French rail operator to entrust the maintenance of its tram tracks to Vossloh’s High-Speed Grinding (HSG) procedure.

Vossloh (www.vossloh.com) has revealed that it machined Toulouse’s entire tram network in only eight nights from late June to early July 2017, at an unprecedented average speed of over 20kph.

Jean-Louis Huillet, who is responsible for tram system infrastructure at Tisséo, said: “We contracted Vossloh after receiving a very attractive proposal in response to our public tender invitation.

“This offer allows us to grind our entire network regularly; in the coming years, we expect to see an improvement in the rail surface and a reduction in noise emissions.”

Measurements of the rail surface taken beforehand made it possible to analyse the different zones requiring machining and determine the number of passes the HSG-City system would need to make in order to ensure the longest-possible future service life.

Some of Germany’s largest tram networks have been relying on HSG technology since 2013, while cities such as Copenhagen and Aarhus in Denmark, and Beijing, Guangzhou and Harbin in China, are also using this procedure to optimise their maintenance schedules.