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.
Maybe after this all the various Russian teams will finally be banned completely. Country is full of cheaters anyway.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doping_in_Russia
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Individual_Neutral_Athletes_at_the_2024_Summer_Olympics
In another story, Belgium making arrests for terrorism related to France: https://apnews.com/article/terrorism-belgium-suspects-olympics-966191331732ea4d1e663a65d96a9e49
I wonder if these are related.
How does this help their cause?
If you mean Russia, and if it was Russia, the cause is to sow chaos.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/09/05/gerasimov-doctrine-russia-foreign-policy-215538/
What cause? We don’t know who is responsible
So its just terror?
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To weaken France’s image, to sow chaos, to get security forces focused on other things while they try to get specific targets.
There have been reports about both Russia and Iran being potentially involved.
So far I’ve seen an article about a Russian getting arrested 2 days ago.French newspapers don’t mention any of those for now, the only mention is that the methodology is similar to previous far-left activism (source: https://www.lemonde.fr/societe/live/2024/07/26/en-direct-attaque-massive-contre-la-sncf-reprise-progressive-du-trafic-un-tiers-des-trains-circuleront-vendredi-apres-midi_6258634_3224.html), which could be a disguise of course. As to why the far-left would do that, there are radical-ecologists that argue it is an unacceptable waste simply for entertainment, considering the climate crisis, for example. It could also be both, local activists helped by foreign influence, willingly or not.
From what I’ve seen, French newspapers have only mentioned the Russian for now.
Russian spy arrested in Paris after alleged plan to ‘destabilize’ Olympic Games (Le Monde, English)
I know this is terrible of me, but… I was originally not planning on watching the opening ceremonies. Now I’m going to scare-watch them.
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,
