Millions hit by rail disruption

RAIL timetables for the four million daily passengers across France are set to change radically with 85% of schedules being affected over the next three years.

Although the changes do not come into force until December 11 SNCF has published details of the new timetables early because of the massive scale of the change and disruption to daily travel.

It is the largest single change SNCF has ever made and president Guillaume Pepy said the confusion would be on the same scale as the “changeover to the euro”.

The disruption comes as the company struggles to manage three different causes: vital repair works on 36,000km of track, the need to realign services to cope with the launch of the Paris-Rhine-Rhône TGV service and, soon, new services in Aquitaine and Brittany, and, as a consequence, a plan to resequence timetables across the network.

In all, 30% of the 15,000 daily timetables will change each year until the completion of the project, due in 2015. The SNCF says that the changes will affect not just departure times but also journey times – sometimes by just several minutes but others will be extended by several hours. Some services will also be cancelled.

Much of the work has been prompted by the need of rail network operator Réseau Ferré de France (RFF) to change massive sections of ageing track in works costing €13bn. Some of the damaged track is 25 years old. RFF intends to carry out most of the work at night, but some rail lines will need to close at times.

Fitting in the new Strasbourg-Lyon TGV service – part of the Paris-Rhine-Rhône link – also means changing timetables south of Paris to ensure connections.

The new timetables have been posted here

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