Vandières (Meurthe-et-Moselle), July 26, 2024. Fiber optic cables set on fire during coordinated sabotage of the TGV network.

On the night of Thursday July 25 to Friday July 26, just hours before the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympic Games, high-speed train (TGV) lines were attacked in all directions leading to the capital. A “massive, coordinated attack to paralyze the network”, as many newspapers headlined. On Friday alone, “250,000 customers” were affected by these acts of sabotage, and “almost 800,000 over the weekend”, according to the rail company. “Through the SNCF, it’s a part of France that’s being attacked, and it’s the French people who are being attacked”, SNCF boss Jean-Pierre Farandou immediately declared, while denouncing the saboteurs as “a bunch of kooks, irresponsible people”. For her part, Sports Minister Amélie Oudéa-Castera couldn’t contain her anger: “These are the Games for athletes who have been dreaming of them for years and who are fighting for the Holy Grail of climbing these podiums, and we’re going to sabotage that for them! Playing against the Games is playing against France, it’s playing against your side, it’s playing against your country.”

In the Nord region, the TGV network was sabotaged at Croisilles, near Arras (Pas-de-Calais), cutting off international rail traffic to London, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany. In the east, the network was cut off at two separate points: between the Meuse TGV station and Lamorville (Meuse), and between Pagny-sur-Moselle and Vandières (Meurthe-et-Moselle). To the west, the line was cut at Vald’Yerre, near Courtalain (Eure-et-Loire), affecting both the direction to Brittany (Rennes, etc.) and Gironde (Bordeaux, etc.). And on the South-East line (Paris-Lyon-Marseille), an attempt at sabotage took place at Vertigny (Yonne), which apparently failed after the saboteurs were surprised “by railwaymen who were carrying out maintenance operations during the night”, leading the gendarmes to get their hands on “incendiary devices” which had not been ignited and were immediately sent to the lab.

Map of sabotage on high-speed lines on the night of July 25-26, 2024 (Le Monde)

Furthermore, in the Paris suburbs, also concerning the network to the west, an overhead power line was ripped down between Montparnasse station and Vanves-Malakoff (Hauts-de-Seine) by a TGV train that tried to use a more conventional line that wasn’t designed for it (Transilien’s N), further aggravating the consequence of the sabotage… which, for the SNCF, means an incident “linked to the malicious acts committed on the Atlantic high-speed line”. As for the background, its CEO deplored “the obvious desire to cut Paris off from its main high-speed lines just before the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games”, in a press conference held on Saturday July 27.

All in all, this pre-Olympic summer night was officially marked by five targeted sites across France, with four successful sabotages and one thwarted, between 1am and 5.30am. Each time, fiber optic cables were severed or set on fire, in small channels running along the tracks, and located not far from signal boxes coordinating important nodes of rail traffic, where the tracks split in several directions. “With [such] a fire, we’re actually losing two branches of the network each time”, explained SNCF Réseau boss Matthieu Chabanel (Le Figaro, 26/7). Indeed, these now burnt-out cables control the switch motors, but are also used to transmit information to the signaling stations. As soon as the signaling or switch control cables were damaged, cut or burned, the systems immediately went into red light mode,” explains Vincent Téton, Deputy Director General of Operations and Production at SNCF Réseau, who is also in charge of crisis management coordination. “Trains running on the affected tracks then stopped automatically”. (Le Parisien, 27/7).

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