LE TRAIN SUR PNEUS, L'HISTOIRE DE CE TRAIN QUI AURAIT BOULEVERSÉ LE MONDE DU TRANSPORT SUR RAIL

It is probably the most famous and the most misunderstood railcar of all. Its career was very short for a railway engine, but we have all heard someone talk about their trip aboard a Micheline, while those who have had the chance to climb aboard one of them are ultimately very few in number and it was a long time ago. The Michelines were small, light railcars which had the originality of rolling thanks to wheels fitted with tires, and it worked rather well. Very comfortable, these machines even recorded several speed records on rails. In the 1930s, the train was not very comfortable, the nagging thud produced by the steel wheels passing from one piece of rail to the other caused numerous regular jolts and a lot of noise. André Michelin would long remember a nighttime train journey he had planned, during which he hadn't been able to sleep a wink of sleep. He then vowed to find a solution to improve passenger comfort. And when your name is André Michelin, and you're a captain of industry at the head of a company that produces tires, the solution inevitably involves equipping the wheels with tires. The introduction of tires in the automotive industry had revolutionized this industry, and the Michelin brothers hoped to do the same in the railway industry. Their commercial target? The various railway companies. All of them were loss-making at the time, largely due to the small lines they operated: on the one hand, customers were deserting them because the trains didn't run fast enough; on the other, they ran very heavy equipment, ultimately carrying only a small number of passengers, which contributed to making operations very expensive. The Michelin brothers' idea was to develop light rail vehicles that were inexpensive to maintain and very comfortable for passengers, as the air cushion formed by the tire would absorb shocks and eliminate rolling noise. The first operational Micheline was the Type 11. It dates from 1932 and its appearance remained very close to that of a road vehicle. It was a cross between a coach and a semi-trailer. 11 examples were built. Being equipped with only a driver's cab, it was necessary to turn it over at the end of each line. Its capacity was 24 seats. The Michelin company then decided to also focus on mainline service, for which it would develop new Michelines, designed for speed and with greater capacity. The Tire-rail technology was thus officially and definitively abandoned in France in 1956, after a final hurrah in the post-war period. This one has the particularity of being electrified. It will be put into regular service on the Auteuil-Pont-Cardinet line in August 1940. An articulated railcar with 3 cars, it is very similar to the two triple Michelines delivered to the state network but powered by 4 electric motors. Current collection is via a 3rd rail, through collectors. Despite very good performance and undeniable comfort for its passengers, the SNCF will not push the experiment further. The public company never showed great enthusiasm for these machines, whose fairly regular punctures led to troubleshooting operations that were difficult to carry out on the track. Imagine: you had to get out the jack and lift a machine weighing around 15 tons to change the damaged wheel. On the preservation side, unfortunately not much, or you have to go very far, to Madagascar in particular, where 3 Michelines of type 51 are still in circulation as part of a tourist exploitation, in China where there is one still exhibited in a railway museum, but fortunately closer to home another is presented in the hall of the Aventure Michelin museum in Clermont-Ferrand and a last one at the Cité du Train in Mulhouse.