High speed birth on Paris-Brussels Thalys train

Taking the high-speed train that links Paris and Brussels isn't usually a dramatic affair, but on Monday the Thalys service experienced a "first" since it started operating in 1996 as a baby girl was born on board shortly before the train reached its destination.

As Thalys (the equivalent of the Eurostar service only it connects the French and Belgian Belgian capitals) leaves Gare du Nord in Paris, it doesn’t waste much time in picking up speed and zapping through the notoriously flat northern French countryside.

In fact the landscape passes in such a giddy blur that it's just as well passengers can fit in a spot of work during the journey. That's made easier by the wifi Internet connection (free in first class, a small supplement in second) which is a must-have for a service that has become the usual way for businessmen and politicians to travel - almost "commute" between the two cities.

In peak hours, trains leave from Paris every 30 minutes - and it has become an even more important link between the two cities since Air France stopped flying the route because it simply couldn't compete.

The train reaches a maximum speed of 300 kilometres per hour, and that apparently was how fast it was travelling when a woman went into labour on Monday.

Luckily for both the expectant mother and the baby there was a doctor on board, and as the train manager Michel Pauly said, the birth really was a maximum velocity one.

"The birth went very smoothly, I didn't realise it could happen so quickly," he said.

"After the woman contacted me I made an announcement and we were lucky enough to have two nurses and a doctor on board who helped in the delivery," he added.

"The little girl was born without any complications...she was clearly in a hurry to discover the country."

It was all over by the time the train pulled into Brussels, where the mother and baby were transferred to hospital - both in fine fettle according to reports.

And should the as yet unnamed girl wish to take the train again, she won't have to dig deep into her pockets as the boss of Thalys, Olivier Poitrenaud, has offered her a life-time pass to travel free with the company.

A nightmare trip

It wasn’t so much the journey to hell and back as a 10-hour one-way train ride to nowhere.

And it was to be the longest of nights for the 650 travellers who boarded the Paris-bound Eurostar train in London on Friday evening.

What was sheer misery for the passengers soon became a catastrophe for the train operators, France’s much-revered SNCF, as technical blunders and wrong decisions followed hard on the heels of each other.

Sadly the tale of the tortuous train trip tells like a French farce.

It left London as scheduled at 8 o’clock in the evening local time, due to arrive in Paris just under two and a half hours later. A marvel of modern technology in which the high speed train reaches a top speed of 300kms per hour – when all goes to plan of course.

There were no problems entering France as it passed through the channel tunnel that separates the two countries, still on time. But then the gremlins had their say.

Another Eurostar train, but one bound in the opposite direction, had been halted in Lille in northern France after a warning light came on. That light meant it had failed the security requirements to enter the channel tunnel and couldn’t continue its journey.

So when the Paris-bound train pulled into Lille, passengers swapped trains - remember there was nothing wrong with the one that had arrived from London, so it could make the return trip without any problem.

That left the Paris-bound travellers now sitting in what they were soon to find out was a train straight from the pages of a Stephen King novel. Almost one and a half hours later it eventually agreed to get its huffing self out of the station.

Perhaps this was the point at which SNCF should have realised that this was a train with more than just a slightly off hair day. In fact it had an all round bad attitude, and was doomed never to complete its journey. But there again hindsight is never kind.

It was rolling along less than merrily some 120kms north of the French capital when it finally had a complete nervous breakdown and lost all power.

Stuck in the wee hours of the morning, the passengers were then asked to walk along the trackside to a third “rescue” train, because the broken-down one couldn’t be shifted.

Train number three finally made it into Paris Gare du Nord station at a quarter past nine local time the next morning. Even with the one-hour time difference between the two countries, that’s a humdinger of a delay.

The director of SNCF’s France-Europe, Mireille Faugère, apologised profusely and called it a “completely unacceptable situation in which the passengers had had a miserable experience.”

Now there’s a woman who doesn’t believe in understatement. The 650 had spent hours without any heating, light or sound and with absolutely no idea of what was going on.

Upon arrival they were offered a gratis breakfast, taxi rides to their final destination, full cash refunds on both legs of their return tickets and - as a crowning glory and probably just about what any sane person dreams of after such a trip - a free return ticket for future use.

Perhaps they would be happier flying next time.

Not surprisingly a full enquiry has been launched.