Passengers experienced new problems on Monday on the Paris-Clermont-Ferrand line.
This Monday, January 13, the locomotive of the first Intercités of the day broke down, blocking all subsequent trains.
How can we explain that these incidents have almost become the norm on this line?
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The 8 p.m.
She is nicknamed “the cursed line”. And for good reason. This Monday, January 13, passengers on a Clermont-Paris train arrived at their destination almost four hours late. “We took the time, we slept”quips one of them in the video above. It must be said that these Paris-Clermont regulars subscribe to delays. “Friday there was a delay and this morning too”says a young man. A mother continues: “There are often problems on the line, machine problems”she said.
“A delay in maintenance”
What happened this Monday morning at dawn? At 5:50 a.m., the Intercités leaves Clermont-Ferrand, but between Riom and Vichy, a locomotive breaks down. Another helper comes to his rescue to push the train to Paris. This is one more episode in the long series of Paris-Clermont delays, often mentioned in TF1 news. With the same litany each time: “After 6 hours of delay, they finally arrive”, “after 11 hours of waiting, they arrived at eight this morning”, “11 hours stuck at night in the cold due to a locomotive breakdown”, “in total, more than 14 hours to reach Paris from Clermont-Ferrand”.
Ghislain de Tournemire lives in Clermont. This morning, like every Monday, he was supposed to take the train to Paris, but he quickly gave up when he saw the delay. He is exasperated. “It’s a bit of a lottery. Over the course of a week, we regularly have a train that is 2, 3, 4, 5 hours late”he states. Why so much delay? For Béatrice Jarrige, railway expert, it is above all because of the obsolescence of these intercity lines. “There is, as we know, a maintenance delay on the entire rail network in France. In particular on this line, there were real problems of dilapidation”she says.
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“It’s the train from hell”: the SNCF Paris-Clermont line finally on the right track?
SNCF had planned to replace the Intercités trainsets this year, but delivery delays are forcing the company to find other solutions. “We have deployed the new troubleshooting team based at the Nevers technicentre, capable of responding quickly,” SNCF indicated this Monday in a press release.
The company assures that there are nevertheless improvements. The most significant delays, those of more than 2 hours, have been halved in one year, going from 27 in 2023 to 15 last year.
