- Before running the trains again this Monday morning, we had to inspect the entire network of Nouvelle-Aquitaine.
- Everything had been prepared for weeks for a resumption of traffic this Monday morning.
- But the heavy rains on Sunday evening came to disrupt train traffic, with three sectors particularly affected.
For weeks that the SNCF has been preparing to resume rail traffic. But Sunday evening, it had to contend with a red alert to the rains and floods in New Aquitaine, which came to disrupt at the last minute the transport plan put in place for this Monday morning. 20 Minutes asked Florent Kunc, deputy territorial director of SNCF Réseau in Nouvelle-Aquitaine, about how his teams had to manage the situation.
After a break in traffic of almost eight weeks, on most lines in New Aquitaine, you do not restart a network with a snap of your finger: what were your main constraints?
You have to keep in mind that half of the thirty main lines of New Aquitaine have been suspended, and about a third of the 3,800 km of rail tracks, this was extremely significant. There were only a few TGVs and some TERs left, it mainly circulated freight - activity was even sustained - and some TGVs medicalized. This situation creates a less monitored network, since usually the train conductors bring us up to date on possible problems on infrastructure, structures, and that due to the confinement we had far fewer staff available to inspect the network, and that referral stations have been closed. So we no longer had the reality of the situation in real time, such as the state of the vegetation, the state of the electrical systems, level crossings ... Before relaunching the network this Monday morning, we therefore had to circulate trains, which we called technical circulations, to have this operational feedback from the conductors, and to see if all the electrical installations were functioning properly.
Were there any unpleasant surprises?
We were able to have branches in such and such a place, or layers of rust which were deposited on rails, which creates a kind of insulation at the level of the electrical system. These are situations that we know when we resume after a relatively long interruption, except that there, we found ourselves in an exceptional situation with many lines unavailable at once.
No major bad surprise, but you had to deal with Sunday evening with the heavy rains that fell on the region…
It was the icing on the cake. With all the work accomplished in recent weeks, all our mobilization, again this weekend, we did take this red rain-flood alert Sunday evening. This forced us to modify the conditions of the recovery transport plan at the last moment. We decided to run our first empty trains this Monday morning, which was not planned, to recognize the infrastructure and see if there was any difficulty. We did well because we had three problematic sectors: near Pau, on the Bayonne-Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port line, and between Facture and the Arcachon basin. These were fallen trees on the track, and this disrupted the restart. It's a shame because the imagined transport plan was going well.
The transport plan must lead to a total resumption of traffic by mid-June, if there are no problems?
Yes, the ramp-up of the TER transport plan will take place gradually, with just under 50% of the trains running on Monday, and progressing until mid-June.
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