Fires on French railway tracks have delayed journeys for 800,000 travelers in what the transport minister described as “coordinated attacks of malicious intent.”

A co-ordinated arson attack on the French rail system is turning the first weekend of the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris into a nightmare for hundreds of thousands of travelers.

French rail company SNCF announced on Friday its high-speed train system had been hit by “deliberate arson attacks to damage [its] facilities” causing delays and cancellations which are expected to last all weekend.

The disruptions are affecting trains heading East, North and West of Paris, and travelers have been asked to postpone their plans.

  • Quacksalber@sh.itjust.works
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    3 months ago

    He has a point though. Burn down one relay station and a whole region of switches and signals seizes to function. Collapsing a bridge is no equivalent to that.

    • puppy@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      That would’ve been the case in early times. Now everything is computer controlled. So redundancy should be built into the system. For example Japanese bullet trains run in one of the highest earthquake prone regions in the whole world. And they get hit by earthquake frequently. Yet the bullet train delays are messured in seconds! Not minutes, not hours, literally seconds. Not to mention that after more than 50 years of service that haven’t been a single passenger fatality. Zero.

      • SpacetimeMachine@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        Yea but that’s Japan. The culture there really is completely different. I wouldn’t count on other metro services to be as well planned and run as theirs is.

      • Quacksalber@sh.itjust.works
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        3 months ago

        Redundancy or not, the cables that send those computer signals run alongside the tracks. Cut those and everything stops.

    • Ghoelian@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      3 months ago

      I guess the equivalent would be burning down a traffic control building or something, taking out the traffic lights (assuming those are centrally controlled, i have no clue tbh)

      But even that would be mostly solved by sending out all the lollipop people.