Rail resilience is bought, trained and rehearsed before anything goes wrong

On the platform: Gautier Brodeo, President of UITP and a director at RATP Group, on paying for resilience before disruption arrives

“I don’t have the information right now. I’ll let you know in two minutes and I will come back to you.”

It is the kind of announcement Gautier Brodeo says RATP trains its drivers to make when something has gone wrong and the facts have not yet arrived. Performed in his own voice, it carries on: “You are in a safe position. So please don’t open the door. I’m here. I’m the driver. You should be confident with me.”

Brodeo became President of UITP, the International Association of Public Transport, in November 2025 and was elected to the post by its General Assembly on 23 June 2026. He made his case to Ian Westcott, Editor of Global Railway Review, in September, aboard the European Train, which carried rail sector leaders from Brussels to Berlin ahead of InnoTrans 2026. Resilience, he argued, is more than a response when service fails. It is bought in the assets a railway specifies, built in the staff it trains and tested in the exercises it runs, and all of it has to be paid for before anyone can prove what it prevented.

He makes that case as an operator and as a director at RATP Group. Years in operations, he says, keep him close to reality. He is also a train driver and holds a certification to operate automated metro lines. Driving means taking responsibility, and it lets him tell quickly whether an idea will work in practice. It has reinforced a conviction he wanted to bring to UITP: “Innovation has to serve our operation and passengers.” Technology matters, but it has to deliver better services, a better passenger experience and a more resilient network.

The difficulty is time. Political leaders are not against public transport, Brodeo observes, but the position changes when it has to be paid for. The case must be made as a decision for society and a public service, not because an operator wants a new line. Investment runs on timelines of decades, longer than a politician’s mandate, and the climate transition, which means less CO2, arrives alongside its consequences: heat and freezing.

Buying rail resilience for the climate to come

Resilience begins with what a railway buys, because a renewal or a refurbishment lasts a long time. Air conditioning is Brodeo’s example. Some cities did not specify it in trains 15 or 20 years ago; after the summer just gone, he cannot imagine anyone choosing to go without it. Equipment bought now, he says, should be specified to withstand more than 40 degrees.

Sometimes you invest to ensure nothing happens.

Gautier Brodeo, President, UITP

Buying to that standard costs more to deliver the same service, which he calls “not easy to explain”. The return on resilience is difficult to prove, and when something does go wrong journalists are very happy to find something that was not invested in. People like to see that something has gone wrong, he adds, and it is a pity: “Sometimes you invest money to ensure nothing happens.”

Rehearsing for the failure nobody predicted

Assets are only one pillar; the others are people and procedure. Staff have to be trained for an unpredictable event and stressed against it, so that they are not surprised when something new happens and respond correctly. Processes must be well defined and governance well organised, and both tested through exercises. RATP tests them against flooding.

The flood in question is the one Paris last saw in 1910. “During your professional life, you will never see this,” Brodeo says. “Statistically, it will happen, because normally it’s 100 years period.” RATP defines a centennial flood as one with a one-in-100 chance of occurring in any given year, not one flood every 100 years. In 1910, according to RATP, the Seine peaked at 8.62 metres at the Austerlitz bridge and left half of the transport network unusable for months.

If you don’t know where your holes are, the water will find it.

Gautier Brodeo, President, UITP

Civil protection teams from other countries come to Paris to join RATP in testing the devices that protect its entrances. “If you don’t know where your holes are, the water will find it.” RATP also stages an exhibition for passengers, which he likens to a showcase of what it plans to do in a flood. The order of priorities is fixed: passengers and staff first, protected together, then the assets. The same applies to a fire.

For the passenger, resilience arrives as information. Asked who answers for making a multimodal network work as one system, Brodeo starts with the stakeholders: the authorities that take the political decisions, the operators that take the technical ones and the other mobility providers. Passengers do not care who operates which service and should not have to think about competition between operators. If the journey is not easy, he warns, the car becomes the easier choice. On an ordinary day passengers know the way and the frequency is enough: another train is two minutes away. When something fails, passenger information starts to do its real work.

It also faces competition. RATP works with civil protection and the police, and the instruction it gives may be a route that looks slower on paper because it avoids an overcrowded place. “Maybe longer on the paper but it will be safer.” Social media and new apps, with an algorithm behind them, may send passengers another way, one the operator knows is not the right one. His question is how to be sure the passenger finds the truth, and part of the answer is for RATP to be on social media too. The rest is the driver. A driver is not an actor, Brodeo concedes, but RATP trains drivers with actors to tell the story of what is happening and to give the reality.

Cyber-security has no finish line

UITP’s position paper on building cyber-resilient public transport systems, published in April 2026, states that 100% cyber-security cannot be achieved. Asked what good enough looks like, Brodeo would not fix a level. Cyber-security is fundamentally about managing risk, and it is moving very fast. It is a pressure Global Railway Review has traced as Europe moves from GSM-R to FRMCS and newer digital systems.

It is not only software. The places where systems live need protecting too. On an automatic train the onboard computers are not linked to the company network, so the boundary is clear by design and protected physically as well as by separation.

The weak point is rarely the operating system, which was built with cyber-security in mind. People arrive by another door. His example is the staff committee, which he likens to a union representative: the body through which employees buy holidays or concert tickets at a low price. It has little to do with the daily job and its people are not well trained in cyber-security, so an attacker can enter that way. The same goes for subsidiaries and subcontractors.

Brodeo likens transport to hospitals: attacks reach both, and there are lives behind the service. A railway moves the city through its network, so an attack on it can cause trouble across the city. Complete protection is not possible, he accepts, so the defence rests on knowing the organisation’s own weaknesses, understanding the risk and training staff in what to do when something happens. “It’s never finished,” he says; it is a continuous process.

He ended on the flood. “The water will find the hole,” he said, as he had mentioned earlier. Artificial intelligence, he suggested, may do the same to a system.

Previously on the platform, we spoke to Doctor Sarah Schlobohm of GBRX about how to get rail’s AI past the pilot.