Rail freight traffic in France is being affected by ‘block everything’ protests on Wednesday 10 September targeting transport and other services. “We are expecting the impact to be quite significant. The main difficulties will be in northern France (mainly in Calais) and the Paris region (Le Bourget and Bobigny) – strategic routes for our trains,” Alexandre Gallo, President and CEO of DB Cargo France, told RailFreight.com.
Left and far-left activists, opposed to French government policies, are largely behind the protests and given the lack of centralised leadership and ad hoc organisation via social media, the potential scale of the disruption today is difficult to gauge. The SUD-Rail union, representing workers at SNCF, has called for “all rail services to be blocked” while the CGT union also called on “all railway workers to participate massively, through strike action, in the day of action on 10 September.”
Both unions, along with the UNSA Ferroviaire union, which together represent 70% of SNCF staff, have also issued a call to strike on 18 September. State-owned railway SNCF is expecting disruptions, particularly on its regional and inter-city passenger services – with the Greater Paris region likely to hardest hit -but not on its long-distance, high-speed TGV network.
Overnight, there had been “two malicious acts” disrupting some services in southern France due to criminal damage to cabling alongside the tracks, it said.
Disruptions expected
Rail Logistics Europe (RLE), which groups all of SNCF’s activities in the rail freight sector, told RailFreight.com yesterday, Tuesday, that it was expecting little impact on its services. However, DB Cargo France’s Gallo said the optimism displayed by RLE and French rail network manager SNCF Réseau “seems detached from our reality, as the operational impacts are significant at this stage.”
He said there had been already disruption to DB Cargo France’s operations yesterday evening and overnight with significant changes having to be made to transport planning and this would likely continue into the early hours of Thursday, 11 September. “Around 15 trains schedules are subject to adjustments in consultation with SNCF Réseau, sometimes very significant ones for our drivers,” Gallo added.