Eurostar has not been running for 3 days and has been roundly criticised for not informing passengers what’s going on. In that climate you would have thought that other train operators would have been especially attentive to customer service in the event of delays. Oh no, not even close.
Sarkozy even called in Guillaume Pepy, boss of SNCF, to ask for an explanation of the Eurostar mess. Perhaps Sarko could also ask how SNCF can provide such shockingly bad service on its own trains too.
Yesterday I took SNCF TGV 9834, scheduled to depart Bruxelles at 15h20, final destination Marseille St Charles, via Lille Europe and Charles de Gaulle Airport.
The screens at Gare du Midi showed no delay, TGV due to depart on schedule. Passengers board. More and more board, including, as it turns out, passengers also bound for Perpignan whose train had been cancelled. And then… nothing. The train did not move, no announcements were made, until a small word on the tannoy told us the doors were closing – a full 40 minutes late.
5 minutes into the journey a further announcement told us that bags must not block the doors, but not a word was said about the delay and no apology was made. A stressed elderly lady sat beside me in the train bemoaned the fact that she would already have missed her onward bound connection.
We arrived at Lille Europe 40 minutes late, still no explanations, and some passengers disembark. An announcement tells us the train is supposed to be attached to another train, but there’s no explanation of when we will leave.
So I decided to take matters into my own hands and went to ask the train staff gossiping and smoking on the platform (pictured). I’m told the second train will arrive in 5 minutes. I ask why passengers in the train have not been informed and the response is a shrug of the shoulders of the SNCF employee I spoke to.
The first announcement to passengers in the train that there was a delay was made at 17h07, precisely 61 minutes after the train was due to have left Lille Europe, and 1 hour and 47 minutes after the train was due to leave Bruxelles Midi.