Although the technical incidents causing major delays at Paris-Montparnasse station were partially resolved on the evening of Friday July 28, the night was marked by major delays and train traffic was still affected on Saturday morning . “Train traffic is disrupted this morning on the Atlantic high-speed line. The reuse of personnel and equipment has been impacted by weather-related delays the day before,” SNCF Voyageurs announced on Twitter, renamed X.
“We have some delays on the first trains,” an SNCF spokesperson told Agence France-Presse (AFP), saying “the situation should be restored this morning.” “SNCF Réseau is sincerely sorry for the situation experienced by TGV customers using the high-speed line [LGV] Atlantique last night,” he added.
The SNCF site still showed mid-morning delays departing from and arriving at the station, ranging from ten minutes for a train to Nantes, forty-five minutes for trains to Saint-Malo and Lannion, and more than three hours for a train from Bordeaux.
hours late
On Friday afternoon, “traffic was disrupted at the entrance and [at] the exit of the high-speed line due to signaling problems due to bad weather south of Massy,” the railway company told Le Monde. The signaling failure was caused by “lightning, falling on equipment, causing several disturbances of signaling installations”, south of Massy (Essonne), at the entrance and exit of the high-speed line.
At the start of the evening, the SNCF announced that it had resolved the incident. While part of the TGV traffic has been diverted to a conventional line, delays have accumulated towards and on arrival from the south-west and west of France, including the Atlantic arc, which is very popular with holidaymakers.
An AFP reporter on site described crowded halls, with travelers staring at information screens. “I’m very calm, I deal with it. What bothers me is dragging the suitcases, ”confided one of them, Colette Baslé, while waiting for her train. Cécile, a traveler who had to go to Saint-Brieuc for the holidays, was also fatalistic: “All the trains are late, the station is shielded and my train (…) is still not displayed. »
“The last trains left Montparnasse around midnight,” SNCF said on Saturday, adding that “no train has [had] been canceled”. A Paris-Le Croisic TGV, which left Montparnasse an hour and a half late on Friday, finally arrived seven and a half hours late, after being stopped in the middle of the way for two hours, according to testimony collected by a journalist from the AFP.
“The controller informed the passengers that the driver has finished his working hours and must stop. Another driver is therefore being dispatched from Paris to replace him”, according to this testimony. The travelers arrived at 3:30 a.m. in Nantes, while those who continued beyond had to get off the train.
“Customers arriving late at the station or having broken connections have been taken care of”, explained the rail operator. “For all travellers”, SNCF Voyageurs will apply “the usual commercial measures” of compensation (G30 guarantee), while “additional measures are under study”.
One million travelers expected this weekend
This incident occurred while the SNCF expects a million travelers in the TGV and the Intercités in France during this weekend of crossover.
On July 27, 2018, a power station supplying Montparnasse had been seriously damaged by a fire, also on a Friday of a summer crossover, causing disturbances that had lasted several days. A year earlier already, and still at Montparnasse station, traffic had been paralyzed due, this time, to a signaling failure, which had caused three days of major disruption. The aging network was then called into question.
On the roads, the traffic was very dense Friday at the end of the day in the direction of departures on vacation, with approximately 1,000 km of cumulative slowdowns, before a Saturday classified red by Bison smart. Traffic looks more fluid on Saturday in the direction of returns, the great crossover of holidaymakers should rather take place on the weekend of August 5 and 6.
