ÉCLEPENS. A fire that investigators believe was set deliberately destroyed railway signalling cables beside the tracks at Éclépens in the early hours of Friday, halting all train traffic between Cossonay-Penthalaz and Chavornay and closing one of the busiest rail corridors in French speaking Switzerland for the first autumn weekend. The Vaud public prosecutor has opened a criminal investigation, and SBB has filed a criminal complaint against unknown persons.
The fire was discovered at around 3am in a cable duct beside the line from Yverdon-les-Bains to Lausanne, close to the junction where a siding branches off to the Holcim cement works on the Mormont, the company’s largest production site in Switzerland. The cables in the duct control signalling and points across the region. They burned through and had to be taken out of service, forcing the complete closure of 25 kilometres of track.
SBB ruled out an internal technical cause within hours. The Vaud cantonal police said its first findings pointed to a deliberate act, and the prosecutor assigned the case to the security police, the branch that handles politically motivated offending. A police drone surveyed the burned duct before the scene was released back to the railway at 10am.
Buses via Bern, and an Hour Longer
The closure hit the IC5 and IC51 intercity services that link Geneva and Lausanne with Zurich and Basel, together with the R1 and R2 regional trains of the RER Vaud network. Replacement buses ran between Yverdon-les-Bains and Cossonay-Penthalaz, with shuttle trains added from Friday afternoon between Lausanne and Yverdon. Long distance travellers were told to cross the country via Bern instead, adding between thirty minutes and an hour to the journey.
Around 20 replacement buses and 40 passenger stewards were deployed while a hundred SBB technicians re-wired the damaged control system, working around the clock from late Friday morning. Freight operators, which rely on the corridor for time sensitive trans-Alpine deliveries, rerouted trains where capacity allowed or held them until the reopening.
The railway said on Saturday that normal service would resume at 5.40am on Sunday, in time for the first morning departures. Travellers between Neuchâtel and Bienne remain on buses all weekend in any case, because of separate engineering works planned long before the fire.
A Corridor With No Spare
The incident exposes how little redundancy the Swiss network has on its western axis. The line along the foot of the Jura carries the bulk of traffic between the Lake Geneva region and the rest of the country. When it closes, every intercity train between Geneva and Zurich must funnel through Bern, a detour the timetable was never built to absorb on a holiday weekend.
Cantonal ministers from Vaud and Geneva responded with a demand to accelerate Transports 45, the federal investment programme meant to add exactly the backup capacity whose absence Friday laid bare. Security services, meanwhile, have raised surveillance around critical rail nodes across the country.
For investigators the questions are now who entered the duct, when, and why this spot was chosen. The siding to the cement works is quiet at night, and the cables beside it carry a disproportionate share of the region’s signalling. The prosecutor has said nothing about suspects or motive.
SBB condemned the act “with the greatest firmness” and praised the technicians who rebuilt a 25 kilometre signalling system in under two days. The criminal investigation continues.