When we retire our rolling stock—after they’ve clocked up millions of kilometres of service—railcars don’t go to the scrap yard. Instead, we decontaminate them and send them on to one of our 7 dismantling facilities. There coaches, locomotives and power cars are taken apart. We recycle most components by selling them to the steel industry.

The Chalindrey dismantling site in northeastern France uses cutting-edge recycling and asbestos abatement technology. At its 100-metre-long workshop, two robots use a world-exclusive process to remove asbestos from old trainsets by blasting them with an abrasive product at 800km per hour. Some 1,300 Corail coaches are due to be dismantled at this site by 2030.