surveillance drones protect the tracks

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It is a small three-meter plane, designed to come to the aid of trains. Discreetly, the drone will fly over rails in the middle of the night. Its mission: to detect any suspicious activity, as in images filmed by the SNCF a few months ago. Intruders, filmed on the tracks, are committing malicious acts. The images are scrutinized in real time by a team on the ground.

On the evening of Thursday, November 20, agents were responsible for monitoring a particularly vulnerable section: the largest railway project of the year, the Paris-Orléans line. “We detected activity. We thus have a vehicle and a person“, describes an agent. The team notifies security agents on patrol by telephone to carry out a check. This time, a false alarm.

The drone is, according to SNCF, the most effective means to date of preventing sabotage or cable theft. “Since the summer, we have stopped four networks of copper cable thieves, notably thanks to surveillance operations. But these operations also provide a lot of deterrence“, assures Olivier Bancel, Deputy General Manager Customers and Operations of the SNCF network.

But keeping an eye on these 28,000 km of track is mission impossible. Cable thefts have recently increased in the North and Saône-et-Loire. Inside copper, whose value is on the rise. And there are few alternatives to this metal. “A possible solution is to replace copper cables with optical fiber, particularly for those which are not used to power electrical equipment, but rather to remotely control this equipment. Except that it is very expensive to make these replacements“, explains Arnaud Aymé, the managing director of France SIA Partners, a transport specialist. Each year, SNCF devotes 100 million euros to monitoring its network.