CORYS completed factory acceptance testing in November 2025 with historic customer SNCF on a major project to extend the French national railway’s simulation capabilities to cover a new high-speed train model, the Alstom Avelia Horizon™. Rollout is planned for early 2026.
SNCF implemented a fleet of 36 CORYS Simbox simulators in 2021 with three train models. Five years later, a new project to add the Alstom Avelia Horizon™, known as the TGV M at SNCF, will include removable controllers to adapt the Simbox simulators to the additional train and an update of the simulated high-speed tracks.
For SNCF, training drivers is a prerequisite to putting any new train on the tracks. The release of the TGV M came with a sizeable challenge: SNCF needed to start driver training in a timely manner, but the manufacturer’s data required to complete the project would be made available in stages during the development of the simulator. CORYS and SNCF’s team worked together to create an agile development environment for the project, with six-month milestones as updated manufacturer data became available.
The idea was to be able to start training drivers on almost the full scope of the new simulator as the technical data continued to evolve. The project will have taken around a year from beginning to end, with rollout planned for early 2026.
Denis Milhet of CORYS highlighted the contributions of SNCF’s project team.
“We had to complete several technical validations along the way to derisk the development of the new simulator in a rapidly evolving project environment. We would not have been able to do it without SNCF’s technical experts.”
CORYS is continuing to maintain SNCF’s 36 Simbox simulators. This extension project, which involves modifications to both the hardware and the software, shows not only how flexible CORYS Simbox simulators are, but also how the simulators’ capabilities can be extended to help meet operators’ changing training needs as new train models become available.
