Services resume after sabotage attacks disrupt French rail network

French national rail operator SNCF has said that it has finished repairs to the infrastructure affected by a targeted sabotage on Friday. On Sunday, the rail company said the main western line from Paris was operating almost as normal, while three out of four TGV trains were running on the northern line from Lille, with no delays expected.

Co-ordinated sabotage attacks on French high-speed lines led to massive disruption to TGV and Eurostar services on the eve of the Paris Olympic Games. 

In the early hours of July 26, saboteurs damaged lineside communications cables on three of France’s most important Ligne a Grand Vitesse (LGVs) radiating from Paris, although an attempt to damage equipment on the Paris-Lyon-Marseille LGV Sud-Est was foiled by railway staff.

The attacks disabled essential safety and signalling equipment at key junctions on each of the lines to maximise disruption. This included the LGV Nord at Croisilles, which links Paris with Lille nearly 160 km (98 miles) north of Paris and where connections for Eurostar towards London and Brussels split from the line. It also attacked a junction at Courtalain, near to Le Mans where the LGV line splits towards Renne and Bordeaux separately.  LGV Est was also attacked at Pagny-sur-Moselle with routes towards Strasbourg, Germany and Switzerland affected.

Eurostar services were heavily disrupted on July 26, but gradually returned to normal over the first weekend of the Olympic Games. Around a quarter of all its trains were initially cancelled, while those that remained were diverted over classic lines in northern France, extending journey times by between one and two hours.

By the afternoon on Friday, TGV and Eurostar services had resumed but with mass cancellations, long delays and chaos at the capital’s main Nord, Est and Montparnasse stations. Around 250,000 passengers were affected, and the disruption affected up to 800,000 travellers by the time full services were restored late on Sunday. The attacks also coincided with one of France’s busiest travel weekends of the year as city dwellers started their summer holidays.

Around 1,000 maintenance staff, 40 railway police teams and 50 drones were scrambled over the weekend to repair the damage and monitor the network.

No organisation has claimed responsibility, although French media reported that the methods used pointed towards far-left anarchist groups, which have targeted high-speed railways before.

French Transport Minister Patrice Vergriete said: “Everything points to these fires being deliberate. The timing of the attacks, the vans that have been recovered after people fled and the incendiary agents found at the scene.”

The highly co-ordinated attack saw 500 cables affected in total. At the sites, flammable liquid was poured onto fibre-optic cables and ignited by explosive devices, disabling in-cab signalling and communications equipment at locations chosen to cause the maximum disruption, but well away from the massive security operation taking place in and around Paris.

Further attacks at several provincial locations also disrupted French telecomms networks. A man was arrested by French Police after being found behaving suspiciously near a railway site in Northern France on Sunday.