Hello and bonjour !
It is a cold grey wintery day,
I’m in the city of Nancy, in eastern France,
and this is a tram.
You can tell it’s a tram
because it looks like a tram,
it has signs that call it a tram,
and as my friend Cat is helpfully demonstrating here,
they’ve written the word "TRAM" in big capital letters in the middle of the road.
But if you look closer, something’s not quite right...
Traditionally, trams normally run on tram tracks,
but these have a single central rail, like, well, a monorail.
And traditionally trams have metal wheels,
but these have rubber tyres like a bus.
And this tram is casually running along a road where there aren’t even any tracks.
So what are these wonderful futuristic things?
How exactly do they work?
And why is Nancy completely scrapping them at the end of this week?
This is Nancy, a city of about 100,000 people
(but with half a million in the urban area)
and historic capital of the eastern French region of Lorraine,
which is where your quiche comes from,
although Nancy itself is more famous for its macaroons,
its art nouveau buildings,
and the magnificent UNESCO-listed Place Stanislas.
- ...and would you like to do the honours?
- but of course, we’re not here to see any of that.
No, we are not.
Cat is here for one reason and one reason only;
a final chance to ride... whatever one of these is.
- do we want two or four?
We want a return… No. We can walk back.
- Er no, we’re going quite far.
So I think we get… four tickets yeah.
How much is it?
- 5€60 for two returns.
- That’s pretty good.
- Bargain! It’s a completely unique experience.
Validated!
- Merci!
So our plan is to catch the tram, or whatever you want to call it,
from here in the centre of Nancy, out to the southwest suburb of Vandoeuvre
- a trip that should take us about 15 minutes.
And at as Cat says, we’re about to have a completely unique experience.
Now I’m going to have to clarify that before the meganerds jump on me in the comments...
Nancy is not the only place in the world that has rubber-tyred trams.
There are a couple of lines in the Paris suburbs,
one in Clermont-Ferrand,
and a few others in Italy, China and Colombia.
But none of the other ones can do what the Nancy tram does.
- Ooh. Hang on.
There’s no rail.
I thought this was a tram?
- No. It has now become… a bus!
- Oh?
Yes! At some point, when we weren’t looking,
the tram has come off the track
and is now running along a normal road like a normal bus.
(Or at least a trolley bus. It’s still attached to the overhead electric wires.)
The Nancy trams are the only ones that can separate
from their track and happily carry on running.
So let’s go back a few stops and see how they do it.
We’ve come to a tram stop called Callot, right at the point
where the relatively flat wide boulevards of central Nancy
become a steep and narrow road going up into the suburb of Vandoeuvre.
And this is where you’ll find the end of the tram tracks.
- This is where the magic happens! Let’s have a look…
The trams coming out of the centre stop here for a moment,
disengage themselves from the rail,
and then start heading up the hill out into the suburbs as a trolley bus.
And on the way back down,
the vehicles slow down at the bottom of the hill,
re-engage with the track,
and continue their journey into central Nancy as a tram again.
- As if by magic it's now become a tram!
- It is now a tram.
The concept was invented back in the 80s and 90s
by a Belgian company called La Brugeoise et Nivelles,
who were part of the Bombardier Transportation group,
and they called it a "TVR", a Transport sur Voie Réservée
which is French for "absolutely bonkers magical bus tram thing".
And despite its advantages over rival rubber-tyred trams,
they only ever managed to sell it to two cities
and the other one got rid of theirs in 2017
leaving Nancy as the only place that the TVR still runs.
- It looks like they give it sort of several attempts to actually engage with the rail.
Like, if it doesn’t do it the first time here…
- Oh yeah!
- …then hopefully they get it there...
And if they don’t get it there, then hopefully they get it there...
And finally there.
- And then it stops at the station anyway.
- Yep.
- So they can have a little think.
And what I’m thinking right now is… why?
What’s the point?
Why did Nancy choose a magical bus tram instead of just a normal tram?
Well one of the reasons is this incline between Nancy and Vandoeuvre.
A conventional tram with metal wheels and metal tracks
would struggle for grip on the steeper parts of the slope,
particularly in bad weather,
while a rubber-tyred vehicle has no real problems.
Another reason is that the sales people said it would cost 30% less than a conventional tram
because it needs one less rail.
But it’s fair to say, that brings us onto some more questions.
- So basically, it doesn’t really need the rail does it?
It’s just a bit silly isn’t it?
Well it obviously works without the rail here.
Why not just have a bus?
I think Cat might be on to something here.
Because although the rubber-tyred trams are cheaper
and better at dealing with hills than a conventional tram,
that doesn’t explain why they didn’t just use a conventional bus.
If you ran this route as a bus or a trolley bus
– which, side note, they actually did until 1999 when they bought these things instead –
you wouldn’t have to slow down and stop every time you get to Callot,
you wouldn’t have all the extra costs from constructing and maintaining the rail,
and the vehicles wouldn’t be constantly driving on the same part of the road
and digging grooves into the surface which then need to be repaired.
And just in case that isn’t enough reasons
why they should have bought a simple bus or trolley bus,
strap in, the story is about to get even sillier.
Because here is the route that the trams take through Nancy,
and here is the depot where they are stored and maintained.
That is Nancy’s bus depot.
It is not connected to the tram route, neither by tram tracks, nor even by electric wires.
Which means every single tram has to be fitted with a diesel engine
just so that it can get to the depot and back.
What we’ve got here is a vehicle that can run perfectly happily as a bus or trolleybus
on a route that could run perfectly happily with a bus or trolley bus.
So why, in all of Frenchdom, did they decide to run it on a rail??
Well... there are some advantages.
Firstly, and perhaps most obviously,
the rail means the driver doesn’t have to worry about steering for most of the route.
It’s the same principal as a guided busway.
In fact this basically is a guided busway.
The rail also helps to make the system slightly more accessible,
because the vehicles consistently stop tight to the platforms,
and anyone on wheels can roll straight on and straight off
without needing a ramp.
And one advantage that might be less immediately obvious
is that the system takes up slightly less space.
Because all three articulated sections of the vehicle are guided by the rail,
they always stay in line with each other and reliably follow the exact same path,
even in sharp corners.
Without a rail, the rear two sections would swing out
and you’d have to leave a wider space on each side to avoid potential collisions.
In summary, here are all the reasons I can find for choosing a TVR.
And here are the reasons I can find for choosing a trolley bus.
And you might be looking at that and thinking
I’m not sure the advantages of the TVR outweigh the disadvantages.
Put it this way, that is the conclusion that Nancy has come to.
Brand new trolley buses will arrive in the city next year
and preparatory work starts next week to widen the tracks from 6 to 6.5m.
And that means the final TVRs will run this weekend, the 11th and 12th of March.
After 23 years of slightly nonsensical service,
Nancy’s magical bus-trams have finally reached the end of the line.
Road.
Track.
Rail.
They’re not going to be running any more.
If you’d like to rush to Nancy to catch one of the last TVRs,
the city is less than 2 hours from Paris by train,
and it’s easily reachable from Germany or Luxembourg as well.
And although we paid for our tram tickets,
the moment we got on board we discovered travel is actually free at weekends.
Anyway, a big thank you to my viewers and local experts Siyana, Vincent, and Adrian
for helping me research this story, and providing some extra footage,
and as always, thank you all for watching,
and I'll see you soon.