Thousands of rail travellers faced disruption on Saturday for a second day of cancelled trains as investigators hunt down saboteurs who brought the network to a standstill just before the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics.
Jean-Pierre Farandou, the head of the SNCF rail company, said services would be back to normal by Monday. But officials, including the deputy transport minister, acknowledged that 160,000 of the 800,000 people scheduled to travel this weekend were still forced to cancel trips.
Nearly a third of trains in northern, western and eastern France were cancelled. Nearly a quarter of Eurostar high-speed trains between London and Paris did not run.
No one has yet claimed responsibility for the carefully planned overnight attacks on cabling boxes at junctions in the north, southwest and east of the French capital, just ahead of Friday’s Olympic opening ceremony in Paris. Maintenance workers foiled the fourth attack.
But Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said the investigation was moving forward.
“We have detected some elements and we think we will soon know who is responsible for something that obviously did not disrupt the Olympic Games but disrupted part of the French people’s holidays,” Darmanin told France 2 television.
French authorities are on high alert for possible terrorist attacks during the Olympics, which will run until August 11. Thousands of policemen and soldiers are on Olympic security duty.
According to SNCF, around 250,000 people missed their trains on Friday, as dozens of investigators work to investigate the attack.
SNCF said about three in 10 trains were cancelled on Saturday in the three areas affected by the attacks, and most were still running late by one to two hours.
Speaking in the northern city of Lille, Kathleen Cuvelier said her journey south to Avignon was going to be “hell”.
Cuvelier, who is travelling with her two-year-old son, said she would now have to take a slower train to Paris and then another train to Avignon. “The journey time was four hours and now it’s going to be seven hours”.
“Nobody has any choice,” commented Cécile Bonnefond, whose train from Lille to the western city of Nantes was cancelled.
Trains heading to eastern France have largely returned to normal. But traffic will remain disrupted in northern France and to Britain and Belgium on Sunday, while services heading to western France will gradually improve, SNCF said.
The company said its workers worked overnight “in difficult conditions in the rain” to restore the affected lines.
The coordinated attacks, which took place at 4:00 a.m. on Friday, cut fiber-optic cables along the tracks that provide safety information to train drivers. The attackers also set the cables on fire.
“Everything will be back to normal by Monday morning,” SNCF President Farandou told reporters at Paris Montparnasse station. “We will be ready.”
Most passengers at the station remained patient. But they were regularly warned over loudspeakers that “malicious action” meant trains would be cancelled or delayed.
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