France: Riding on Air

If the French have their way, a ride on a subway need no longer be a nerve-racking, ear-wrecking experience on shrieking steel wheels. The government-owned Paris Metro, which celebrated its 63rd birthday last week, has just installed a revolutionary innovation on its high-traffic Vincennes-Neuilly line: cars that run along the tracks on pneumatic tires. The result of ten years of experiments commissioned by the Métro, the new system was developed jointly by tiremaker Michelin, automaker Renault and the Compagnie Electro-Mécanique. Eventually it will be used along the entire 160-mile length of the Métro.

Though the Métro is the first to experiment with rubber tires on a subway, the Michelin tires have been in use for nearly five years on a mile-long funicular railway that runs cars up and down Mount Carmel in Haifa, Israel. Last week Montreal ordered rubber-tired rolling stock based on the Metro design for the 9½-mile subway it plans to build. Transaco, a French investment firm that is marketing the Metro system, recently signed technical contracts with Istanbul and Rio de Janeiro.

The rubber-tired, lightweight subway cars run on concrete or wide steel tracks and provide a swifter, far quieter and more cushioned ride for passengers. The friction of the tires allows quicker stops and starts so that trains can keep to faster schedules; on some runs the Métro figures that the extra speed will give it the capacity of five trains for the price of four. The trains are designed so that on existing subway systems they can share the right of way with older trains by straddling the steel rails on their own special track. But Transaco feels that the Métro system has its biggest future in entirely new transportation systems being planned in many of the world’s growing cities, where authorities can start from scratch to design for the rubber-tired trains.