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.
No suggestion who or why, could be so many groups in France or from outside.
Does highlight one of the big problems with trains, one problem with the rails and the whole train network is fucked
Same goes for roads as well. Weren’t there major congestion when that ship hit the US bridge?
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.
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.
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.
It’s very different for roads, yeah there are of course bottle necks especially due to river crossings but rerouting is much easier.
Look I get people don’t want to see trains as anything other than perfect but if we want trains to be popular and useful we need to live in reality rather than some delusional fantasy,