Postponement of RER B works to avoid disrupting an Indochina concert

The government has decided to postpone major modernization works on one of the busiest lines in the region. The Indochina concert will not be cancelled.

The government has decided to postpone railway works near Paris in May to avoid disrupting the holding of an Indochina concert, the Ministry of Transport said on Monday February 14, confirming information from Le Monde.

These modernization works are in progress on the RER B, one of the busiest railway lines in Europe and linking the southern and northern suburbs of Paris. They result in traffic interruptions in the evening or on certain weekends.

But the service was maintained on Saturday May 21 in order to facilitate the arrival and departure of spectators of the rock group at the Stade de France in Saint-Denis, confirmed to AFP on Monday the office of the Minister Delegate for Transport, Jean- Baptist Djebbari.

Last November, a report from Transilien announced that public transport could not cope with the influx of spectators in the face of the large number of concerts planned by the Stade de France.

This document also stated that “the evacuation time would be several hours with the risks of public safety possibly being caused by crowd movements (compared to more than an hour today, certain scenarios leading to an evacuation time of 5 hours, unacceptable for personal safety)“.

The railway company therefore proposed to the authorities “the reduction in the gauge of the Stade de France, the time difference of events, the regulated evacuation of the Stadium by ‘slice’, the massive mobilization of the police”.

The works will berescheduled with other works“and this postponement will be done”at no additional cost, contrary to what the article in Le Monde claims“, specified this same source. The newspaper had evoked “several hundred thousand euros“of overtaking.

The minister’s office said it had “requested the postponement of the works, after having checked that they had no impact on the CDG Express or RER D timetable“.

The completion of the CDG Express, a fast train supposed to link Paris to Roissy – Charles-de-Gaulle airport, was postponed last year to the end of 2026.

Contacted Monday by AFP, neither the project manager of the SNCF Réseau works, nor the organizing authority Ile-de-France Mobilités (IDFM) reacted immediately.

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