The French minister of transport (among other things) has threatened the company with sanctions and said that she had not been told the whole truth about the reasons behind that infamous 12-hour plus delay on the overnight train from Strasbourg to Nice and Port Bou just after Christmas.
SNCF apologised (what else could it have done), offered all passengers a full refund and a free return ticket and announced that it would launch an internal inquiry and release a report on what exactly had caused the delay.
It has now published the 13-page "mea culpa", admitting that given the weather conditions and the number of personnel and logistical problems on the night in question, the train should never have left the platform at Strasbourg.
And at the top of a long list of reasons for the delay according to the report, which SNCF helpfully publishes in French on the English-language version of its site (grab a dictionary perhaps if you want to read all the details) is the time it took to find a replacement driver during a stop just 150 kilometres into its journey in the eastern French city of Belfort.
It was "a failure of planning" admits the report, a simple statement that has earned SNCF the wrath of Kosciusko-Morizet or NKM as she's commonly called here in France.
"That's not what I was told at the beginning," the minister for ecology, sustainable development, transport and housing (to give NKM her full title) said in a radio interview on Tuesday.
"When I was given the reason why it took so long for the replacement driver to arrive (he had to travel almost 350 kilometres from Lyon to Belfort) I was told he couldn't get there on time because of the weather."
As far as NKM was concerned she had been lied to (she used stronger words, but there might be children reading) and she was now going to "find out who was responsible for the error in planning and look into whether there would be sanctions to be imposed."
NKM wasn't the only person unhappy with the report.
Not surprisingly perhaps the unions were less than tender with SNCF's explanations with Sud-Rail saying in a statement that "The report is nothing more than hot air."
And a regional branch of the passengers association, Association des Usagers des Chemins de Fer de la Région Ouest (Avuc) has launched a petition "Fed up with SNCF".
So a bad PR end to 2010 for SNCF has hardly been helped by an equally miserable attempt to offer a mea culpa at the beginning of 2011.
Things can only get better - surely
Posts
1 comment:
I don't know what is worse:
14 hours delay on a 12 hour train journey or
10 hours delay for the unfortunate passengers of a Charles de Gaulle-Toulouse easyjet flight, which usualy takes 1h30.
Take your pick. I think I would prefer being in the train from hell rather than being told that there are some technical problems with the plane I'm currently sitting in, in mid air!
Post a Comment