I was stuck in Brussels during the Eurostar mess and so missed my flight to Toulouse from London. I bought a SNCF train ticket from Brussels to Toulouse via Valence for the Monday and went down to Midi to get it. Same thing – it was announced as being on time until … er…the time it should have gone and then moved to “retard a preciser”. 90 minutes later it still hadn’t been “preciser” and given I had clearly missed my connection at Valence, and had no wish to be stranded there for the night, I went back to my friends and tried again the next day. At Midi station there are no screens in the waiting rooms, so everyone waiting to see what the trains were doing had to stand out in the cold. And then the SNCF website said that there were “aucunes perturbations” on the mainlines that day!! A total #fail.

I am not particularly surprised at SNCF staff refusing to give their names though. The reason they act in such a disgraceful way is that they do not expect to be personally held accountable for their actions or behaviour.

That completely sucks, and it mirrors the experience I had when I took SNCF from Toulouse to Paris Nord in May of this year. I was making a trip to London on the day of strikes, and the trains were a mess. No announcements anywhere, just the boards at the stations, which were confusing and inaccurate. The only thing that saved me was Eurostar trains run almost every hour, so I was 3 hours late, and just took a much later Eurostar to complete my very long day of riding the western Euro rails.

Chex in Montreal