France’s futuristic AGV train can travel at speeds up to 360kph, is equipped with articulated bogies and distributed power, and consumes 15 per cent less energy than its rivals

After years on the drawing board, the single-deck Automotrice Grande Vitesse (AGV) made by France’s Alstom has finally started four months of physical tests in the Czech Republic, About USD 155m (RMB 1bn) has been invested in a seven-car prototype, the latest development in very high speed rail travel. Equipped for EU cross-border travel, the AGV aims to be at the fore of a massive expansion foreseen in pan-European high speed lines.

The AGV has been designed to reach a cruising speed of 360kph, which will be assessed when the trainset returns to France in August from the Velim test circuit in the Czech Republic. It incorporates much of the technology of Alstom’s V150 trainset, which established a new world record of 574.8kph for rail speed on 3 April 2007.

       The cruising speed is a significant advance on the current high speed of 320kph of France’s Train à Grande Vitesse (TGV) trains, and means that the AGV can travel 1,000km in just three hours. City centre to city centre, this will give the trains a considerable advantage over air travel, where just getting to an airport and onto an aeroplane can take two to three hours, taking into consideration ticketing, security controls and baggage handling.

Infrastructure to accommodate speed

       Although very high speed trains require extensive investment in infrastructure in order to run properly, high speed rail travel offers many advantages in addition to advantages over air travel. High speed rail travel is currently entering a second expansion phase, boosted by increasing levels of urbanisation and ever greater demand for city links. Growing environmental constraints are another stimulus. Fuelling demand also are the requirements of many developing countries for modern forms of public transport.

       With 3,000km of high-speed lines, nearly 970 trains in circulation, and more than 100 million passengers carried per year, Western Europe is by far the main market for very high speed rail travel, and accounts for 70 per cent of the world market. By 2020, an additional 6,000km of high speed lines are due to be constructed across Europe.

       The overall length of the European network is therefore expected to treble, ushering in a new age of high speed rail travel within Europe. A huge network of high speed connections is being established between leading European cities, such as Paris to Frankfurt, Marseille to Barcelona, Bordeaux to Madrid, and Lyon to Turin. Eventually there may be railway hubs, based on the air transport model, and hence the development of the concept of very high speed train fleets with flexible and complementary capacities, just like airline fleets.

Looking after the environment

In keeping with the times, the AGV is environmentally friendly, with a 15 per cent lower mass and energy consumption than its main competitors. In order to continue reducing the energy consumption of trains – and by extension, their CO₂ emissions – they have to be made ever lighter. This has been achieved for the AGV by the use of composite materials, by enhancing the efficiency of the traction systems, and by deploying the articulated technology pioneered by Alstom. The distributed power concept in the AGV also consumes 30 per cent less energy than a TGV.

Articulated designs

The AGV is also the first train in the world to feature an articulated architecture, with the bogies located between the carriages. This is a solution which provides the highest levels of safety, and is combined with a distributed drive system where the locomotive motors are located on the bogies under the train.

This innovation considerably increases the potential number of on-board seats by eliminating the need for separate locomotives. The novel architecture will give operators a considerable degree of flexibility in how they assemble their trains. They will be able to vary the length of their trains, depending on demand, from seven to 14 carriages and from 250 to 650 seats. The new architecture will also substantially reduce maintenance costs.

The concept of articulated trainsets is not new, and TGVs have always been designed this way by Alstom and French train operator SNCF. However, the TGV and AGV are the only high-speed models in the world to feature articulated design.

The bogies, axles and wheels, of traditional trains are situated beneath the cars, thus below the seats

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