“We have to take our troubles patiently”, cowardly, resigned a user of the RER B, to his companions in the queue. Like other passengers used to the line, the security guard who got up around 5 a.m. on Saturday August 12 had to interrupt his journey, take the RER D at Paris-Gare du Nord, get off at the Stade-de-France-Saint-Denis station, further north, board a replacement bus and finally reach Aulnay-sous-Bois (Seine-Saint-Denis). “It’s too many matches, we’re tired, but even if we shout our anger, it won’t change anything”continues the employee of a private security company.
The northern section of the second busiest line in Europe is exceptionally closed for three days, including, extremely rare, one weekday, Monday August 14. No trains run from Gare du Nord. SNCF Réseau is modernizing the tracks and preparing for the arrival of new metro lines. If such interruptions for works have been frequent lately on the Ile-de-France network, both because it is necessary to add new lines, but also because it is necessary to make up for decades of underinvestment, this stoppage comes on a line like no other. It is that of the airport, but also that of front-line workers. Even in the middle of the weekend of August 15, 200,000 people are expected.
Users guided by megaphone
An exceptional system has been deployed to compensate for this lack of trains. Six hundred additional buses and coaches are mobilized, like a thousand drivers, some of whom were called back during their vacation. Streets are neutralized to install bus stations. An armada of red vests, sometimes acting, baggage handlers, have been recruited to assist travelers. The numbers will be at their maximum on Monday, which remains a big unknown. Carriers, like the transport regulatory authority, Ile-de-France Mobilités, do not know whether calls made for six months to avoid travel on this day – the substitution service can only take 100,000 people – have been heard. However, one year before the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, when it will be necessary, in the middle of summer, to move as many people as one working day in the middle of winter throughout Ile-de-France and on a smaller surface, the authorities are known to be closely observed.
Saturday there is “there were no major disturbances”, said a spokesman for the SNCF. The journeys are lengthened, but for all that, no notable panic on the side of the regulars of line B. Familiar with interruptions, they anticipate. Deen Labeye, 35, electrician and house painter, works on a construction site, at Le Bourget, and knows the work schedule. So, a closing more or less does not panic him, and he calmly follows the indications.
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