Emergency TEE's

In the course of time there have been many service interruptions of course, but only two were very long and required special measures. They will be described here.

8 August 1972-14 December 1972

The section Aix les Bains-Culoz on the Catalan Talgo route was blocked due to a collapse. The trains were detoured during this period through Culoz-Lyon-Valence but maintained their old schedule, although this new route was faster. Also during this period the trains could not be hauled by the standard Talgo locomotives but were hauled on the route until Narbonne.

7 October 1977-27 May 1978

During this period the connection between Switzerland and Italy was broken because of landslides, blocking both the section Domodossola-Switzerland and the section Domodossola-Stresa on the Cisalpin and Lemano routes. The Lemano was dropped until 14 December. The Cisalpin was truncated to the section Paris-Lausanne until 16 October. When on 17 October the connection Switzerland-Domodossola was reinstated the train was lengthened to Domodossola, moreover there were bus connections to Stresa and from that station there was a connecting TEE to Milano quite a bit later. In the reverse direction both sections of the TEE were running on time with an additional emergency TEE connecting to the buses in Domodossola until Lausanne where it was combined with the standard TEE which came from Brig. However arrival time was much later in Paris also for the standard TEE, so on 25 December this was dropped and the two were running separately to Paris from that date. Meanwhile the Lemano started running again on 15 December with the train running normally on the initial part and late (due to the wait for buses) on the last part; the Swiss part of the train from Italy was running under the emergency number. On 15 January 1978 the situation was modified such that the French and Swiss part was running normally while the Italian part was running early (in the direction of Switzerland) or late (the other direction). It was not possible to have that arrangement earlier because reservations that had already been made mentioned a departure time that could not be modd. Finally with the Summer service of 1978 the situation got normal again.