…then have I got news for you, with a basic disruption plan of two days of strikes, three days of work, then two more strike days, three more work days, and repeat.
And this goes on until JUNE.
Oui by SNCF published a list of strike dates. If you have plans that involves travel on any French Railway service – or any rail service that uses French railways to get from A t o B on any of the dates highlighted in orange, my advice is to make new plans as soon as possible.
If today’s strike is anything to go by, International Rail services will also be hit. These include (and not limited to):
- DB (German State Railways)
- Thayls (Western European High Speed Rail)
- Eurostar (UK-France/Belgium/Netherlands High Speed Rail)
- TGV Lyria (France/Swiss High Speed Rail services)
- Thello (Night Sleeper service between Venice and Paris)
- SNCB/NMBS (Belgian National Railways)
- SBB CFF FFS (Swiss Federal Railways)
- REFENE (Spanish National Railways)
With this turning into a showdown between the French Government and the rail unions (as well as other strike action going on in France), it’s going to be a matter of who will blink first.
Sadly caught in the middle of all of this are the passengers trying to travel with SNCF and other international companies are being held to ransom, and in many cases – forced onto the roads, into the air (although if you’re flying Air France – that could turn into a fun thing soon enough, with more strikes on the way – on April 10th and 11th).
Keep this in mind if France is in your travel plans… and plan accordingly.
Strike Date Chart – Oui by SNCF – https://en.oui.sncf/en/train/strike
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Seems like the old days…
Actually, if it is like the old days, those dates could easily change, and strikes have different amounts of support on different days on different lines, making planning difficult. And I do have meetings that would involve me arriving on one of those days, where normally I would take the RER from CDG into Paris. I saw at least one website indicating RER would also be affected (which I would expect).
This seems so counter intuitive: The SNCF employees are striking because they don’t feel competition is needed, but the strikes only reinforce the fact that competition is needed. These actions are likely to only accelerate the government plans for competition. It’s like the Trump/Amazon/USPS situation, where attacking Amazon will only make the company speed up it’s self-distribution system, pulling revenue and profit from the USPS. It just makes no sense.