Le Figaro Marseille
Marseille already no longer has a metro at night from Monday to Thursday.
The city, whose surface area is almost three times the size of Paris, now finds itself without part of its tramway for a long time.
During a press conference given this Tuesday morning, the president of the RTM Catherine Pila announced that the tram which circulates between the Belsunce-Alcazar stations, near La Canebière, and its terminus north of Marseille, at Arenc Le Silo , will not operate
“until at least April 15”
.
Traffic has already been interrupted for two weeks, when a fire of criminal origin broke out on rue de la République, in an Indigo car park whose ceiling acts as a slab for the tram and its rails.
However, the disaster seriously damaged this slab.
And the last technical meetings held this Monday evening are final.
“We first mentioned the possibility of shoring, which makes it possible to install some sort of piles which contain the slab so that the tramway can operate again,”
explains Laure Serre, operations director at Indigo.
We recently made the decision, in consultation with the metropolis, to abandon this solution because it was too technically complex.
Some companies consulted to make shoring offers gave us a blank copy, telling us that they would not respond due to lack of capacity.
And in any case, the delay was extremely long since we were told a delay of six to eight weeks for the shoring.
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Read alsoMarseille: why a simple fire has paralyzed tram traffic for several days
Major work to redo the slab
“We therefore chose to turn to the definitive repair solution for the parking lot slab,”
continues Laure Serre.
The work schedule is currently provisional and we have other diagnostics planned for the coming days to ensure that the technical solution is indeed the right one.
Starting Monday, we consulted companies who will have to present their offers to us by February 15.
The work will begin on March 4 if all goes well and if the diagnostics confirm our hypotheses.
The work deadline is currently set at around three weeks, then there is a drying time for the concrete of around ten days.”
To alleviate the situation, the RTM has decided on the one hand to merge part of the route of lines 2 and 3 of the tramway into a single line, which will connect the terminus of T2, La Blancarde, to the terminus of T3 as of this Thursday morning. , Castellane, turning onto the Canebière.
The stations from Belsunce-Alcazar to Arenc-Le Silo will be served by bus every 7 minutes, at stops close to the initial stations.
The president of the RTM also announced the opening this Saturday of the Joliette metro station, so far under renovation work, which will serve this district now without a tramway.
The interruption of tram traffic in this part of downtown Marseille affects 50,000 travelers every day according to figures communicated by the RTM.