Eurostar services from Paris were cancelled on Friday after a World War II bomb was found on tracks leading to Gare du Nord, France's busiest terminal.
The unexploded bomb was found "in the middle of the tracks" overnight during maintenance work carried out in the area of the northern Paris suburb of Saint Denis, the national SNCF rail company said.
It was detected at about 4am by an earth-moving machine in an area prone to the discovery of World War II relics.
Minesweepers were sent to disarm the metre-long device.
The bomb "dated to the Second World War", the RER B suburban train wrote in a post on social media platform X.
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National rail operator SNCF said in a statement that traffic would be stopped at the train station, which hosts Eurostar trains as well as high-speed and local services, at the request of police.
The other Eurostar routes – between London and Brussels or Amsterdam – were still mostly running as normal.
The Gare du Nord train station lies in the north of Paris and is the country's busiest rail terminal, serving an estimated 700,000 people each day.
Bombs left over from World War I or World War II are regularly discovered around France but it is very rare to find them in such a people-packed location.
(with AFP)
