A Chunk of Rail Was Lying on the Track. A Rouen-to-Caen Train Hit It, Flipped a Carriage and Injured 44.

French investigators suspect sabotage after a regional passenger train derailed in Normandy on Friday evening, injuring 44 people, one of them critically. The train, operated by the national rail company SNCF, was carrying 186 passengers from Rouen to Caen when it left the tracks at about 7:45 p.m. local time in Cléon, a town in the Seine-Maritime department near a Renault factory. One carriage tipped onto its side and four others derailed. An 18-year-old woman was evacuated by helicopter to Rouen University Hospital, police said.

What turned an accident into a criminal inquiry was a piece of rail found lying on the track. A spokeswoman for SICOP, the French national police communications service, told The Associated Press the fragment was "probably" linked to the derailment, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with police policy. Investigators were working to establish whether it got there by accident or by design, and by Saturday the possibility of a malicious act was being treated as the main line of inquiry, according to Irish broadcaster RTÉ. Rouen prosecutor Sébastien Gallois was more guarded. "The reasons for its presence are unknown and will have to be determined by the investigation," he said, according to Agence France-Presse. Gallois also said tests on the train's driver for drugs and alcohol had come back negative.

Passengers described a violent stop. Cléon Mayor Mélanie Delacour told AFP the victims were "in a state of shock." "The windows of the carriages that remained upright shattered, and because of the train's speed, stones flew into the carriages," she said. The scale of the injuries, 44 people hurt out of 186 aboard, reflects how abruptly a train of that size decelerates when a carriage rolls; that no one was killed owes something to the fact that this was a regional service rather than a high-speed TGV.

The derailment paralyzed rail traffic across a corner of Normandy. SNCF Réseau, the infrastructure arm of the national operator, reported "major disruptions" between Rouen and Caen and between Caen and Le Havre in both directions, and a replacement bus service was set up on the Rouen–Caen line, which normally runs about ten return services a day on weekdays and six on weekends. Services had resumed by Saturday morning, RTÉ reported, though investigators remained at the scene.

If sabotage is confirmed, it would be the most serious deliberate attack on French railways in years and would revive questions about the vulnerability of a network with tens of thousands of kilometers of track that cannot be physically guarded. France's rail history includes deadly derailments of other causes: seven people died at Brétigny-sur-Orge, south of Paris, in July 2013, when a faulty rail joint sent a train off the tracks, and 11 were killed at Eckwersheim near Strasbourg in November 2015 when a TGV on a test run derailed. More recently, a collision between two high-speed trains at Adamuz in southern Spain killed 46 people and injured more than 100 in January, according to the Andalusian regional government.

For now, the prosecutor's office is not drawing conclusions, and police say the investigation will have to determine how the rail fragment came to be on the line. The critically injured teenager remained in hospital in Rouen on Saturday.