During the night of Sunday to Monday, October 27, two fires ravaged sensitive infrastructure not far from the TGV station in Valence (Drôme).

The first act of sabotage targeted the Barris quarry, near the Saint-Marcel-lès-Valence railway line, at around 3:30 a.m.: five construction machines (a 50-ton hydraulic excavator, a 40-ton loader, and three articulated trucks) went up in smoke, as did the building that housed the production plant. The Cheval public works group, which specializes in the extraction of aggregates used in concrete manufacturing, believes that “the separate and distant locations of [three] fires lead us to believe that this was not an accident,” and estimates the damage at five to six million euros. In addition, the destruction of the aggregate production plant by fire will result in the cessation of this activity for “at least six months,” lamented the company’s president.

The second act of sabotage occurred 200 meters away, at around 4 a.m., in the town of Alixan, this time directly at the foot of the TGV track, after the fence had been cut: 16 signaling and communication cables located in cable chambers along this sensitive rail junction for the entire Southeast went up in smoke. This meant that repair crews had to replace 16 x 25 meters of cable, including fiber optic cables containing 72 strands that had to be rewelded one by one.

Around 100 TGV trains between Paris and Marseille, Montpellier, Nice, between Toulouse and Lyon, between Marseille and Rennes or Strasbourg, and between Lyon and Brussels/Luxembourg were canceled or severely delayed by this sabotage. This affected nearly 50,000 TGV passengers and 10,000 other TER passengers in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes and PACA regions, not to mention those traveling with Trenitalia and Renfe.

During the day, the investigation was handed over to the research section of the Grenoble gendarmerie (Isère), the SNCF announced that a return to normal was not “envisoned” before Tuesday, and a communiqué in the form of a poem was published on Indymedia Nantes, which we republish below. The next day, journalists announced that the SDAT (anti-terrorism sub-directorate) was now investigating both incidents, particularly “in view of the damage caused and the modus operandi.”

[Summary of the national and regional press, October 27-28, 2025]

via: sansnom translated by Act for freedom now!