The calm before the storm ? Longer journeys but few disruptions this Saturday morning on the northern part of RER B, closed for three days. The “real subject” will be Monday when, for the first time, this busy section will be closed on a working day. Traffic is completely interrupted, for works, until Monday included, on the North axis of line B in both directions of traffic from Gare du Nord to Mitry and between Paris-Gare du Nord and Aulnay -sous-Bois towards Roissy-Paris-Charles de Gaulle airport.
So far “it’s going well. There were no major problems this morning,” an SNCF spokesperson told AFP. “It’s a Saturday of a weekend before August 15, so very few people are circulating, the stations and stations are almost empty,” added this source. “It has already happened several times that the RER B has been closed for a weekend without there being a problem. The real subject will be Monday” when people will have to go to work, he stressed.
Travelers departing from or arriving at Roissy-Paris-Charles de Gaulle, the second busiest airport in Europe with nearly 1.6 million daily passengers, are invited to take replacement buses to the stadium of France, in Saint-Denis, where they can continue their journey towards Paris. “Everything is fine. There was very intensive communication upstream, so it allowed people to anticipate,” said a spokesperson for the ADP group, however. Line K of the Transilien and the TER between Paris and Laon are also interrupted between Paris and Mitry-Claye during these three days.
Despite these alternative means, travel times are greatly lengthened. So to get to Roissy airport, it took about 1h20 on Saturday morning, compared to 31 minutes in normal times, according to the Transilien website.
On social networks, few complaints on Saturday morning: “Mdrrr 1h30 to go to work because there is no rer B”, tweeted at the start of the day @nomesis_21_. The little problem in the early morning seemed to be the Roissybus, making the trip between Opera, in the center of Paris, and Charles-de-Gaulle airport, “taken by storm” according to @mrclemfly. “No more tickets at the machine or on sale with the driver this morning at 7 a.m., poor desperate tourists… especially since they are only spoken to in French…”.
The SNCF, the prefecture of Paris and Île-de-France and Île-de-France Mobilités, the transport organizing authority have called for several days on users to postpone their trips until Monday due to the closure of the line for modernization works. Transport Minister Clément Beaune reiterated this call by posting a message on “X” (ex-Twitter) overnight from Friday to Saturday.
An “exceptional and totally unprecedented” system has been put in place with replacement buses and the reinforcement of frequencies on the closed sections, underlined the minister. More than 600 buses and 1,000 drivers were mobilized on this occasion. But that might not be enough, especially for the day on Monday: the substitute buses “will not be able to transport all the people who would otherwise have taken the RER B”, declared Saturday morning on France Info the prefect of the region Marc Guillaume. According to him, the latter are able “to (trans) carry around 100,000 people” whereas on a Monday like August 14, 200,000 are likely to use this section.
The concern is mainly for the “front line” professions, which cannot pose a day of RTT or telecommute, such as for example health professionals. Clément Beaune and Jean-Pierre Farandou, Chairman and CEO of SNCF, have already planned to go Monday morning to the Gare du Nord to assess the situation.
