French national railway company SCNF told PEOPLE in a statement that the incident occurred on a high-speed line around 8 p.m. local time on Christmas Eve in the Seine-et-Marne region to the east of Paris when a train driver died by suicide "while the train was moving."The company said that the train avoided disaster as it was equipped with a new technology called the "Automatic Standby with Downforce Control," which checks to ensure that there's an "active" driver running the train "at all times." The system kicked in and safely brought the train to a stop on the tracks.
One hundred twenty years ago, the device was called "the dead-man's pedal". Sort of a very early 'artificial intelligence'. Today, in the U.S., it's Positive Train Control - very high-tech.