Can I book a flight instead?

Not unless you move very fast. All three Paris airports (Charles de Gaulle, Orly and Beauvais) will be closed from 6.30pm on Friday afternoon as a security precaution ahead of the opening ceremony – the last plane to land is expected to be the Edinburgh to Charles de Gaulle service, touching down at 5.10pm. 

After this, an area of northern France approximately the size of Belgium will be closed for five hours to all flights, barring emergency and official government services. Normally the three Paris airports would handle as many as 350,000 passengers on a peak Friday summer day.

What about French domestic trains?

France’s national rail operator, SNCF, has advised passengers to postpone their trips and stay away from railway stations. 

In Paris’s main stations of Montparnasse, Gare du Nord and Gare de l’Est, operations were heavily disrupted and stations were extremely busy on Friday morning after trains were delayed or cancelled.

By early afternoon on Frida, French transport minister Patrice Vergriete said: “Traffic is starting to pick up again, and I’d like to thank the SNCF Réseau staff who worked so hard this morning. It was really the Atlantic line that was affected. We should have 1 train out of 3 back this afternoon”.

Are metro services in Paris affected?

The mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, has insisted that the attack on high-speed rail lines will have “no impact on the ceremony” to open the Olympic Games on Friday evening, “because it has no consequences for the transport network” in the Paris region.