“Ashamed”, “Crazy incompetence”: passengers get angry with Thalys after the disruptions

Thousands of passengers were stuck on trains until late Friday evening, or had to wait for a train that never left.

Thousands of passengers were stuck on trains until late Friday evening, or had to wait for a train that never left.

In Paris and Brussels, customers were offered to go home by taxi, to sleep at the hotel or in Thalys trains that remained at the station, said the spokesperson. Between 700 and 800 people spent the night in Brussels-Midi in the Thalys, according to the spokesperson. Others did the same in Paris, but Thalys and SNCF – its majority shareholder – were unable to say how many on Saturday.

In the morning, the trains were between 10 and 50 minutes late Gare du Midi in Brussels, AFP noted on the spot. Two Belgian passengers, Sarah Duray and her husband, arrived from Paris, where they had to spend the night at the hotel, following the cancellation of their Thalys on Friday evening.

“We can understand that there are accidents. What we blame Thalys for is the lack of communication. It’s ‘manage yourselves’, there is no interlocutor”, laments the passenger, who could not take her usual medical treatment because of this unplanned night spent far from home.

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Jurgen Thysmans and his family were also forced to take a hotel room in Paris on Friday evening, after waiting six hours at Gare du Nord. “I am happy to have arrived in Brussels! We are going to claim compensation, ”he told AFP, also regretting not having been able to reach anyone at Thalys. “We were alone to find the solutions! »

An AFP journalist leaving for Amsterdam thus waited, in vain, for four hours Friday evening, Gare du Nord in Paris. He didn’t want to wait any longer to get a taxi voucher, went home and came back at 6am to jump, without a ticket, on a train.

Despite a delay of more than an hour at the start, the trip went well until Brussels, he says, “curled up between two suitcases”. But the passengers of the two trains which continued towards the Netherlands had to squeeze into one in Brussels, while the train was increasingly late.

“We are faced with a mad incompetence”, gets carried away by Thimothé, a 23-year-old business school student who has been traveling upright since the change in Brussels.

Arrived an hour early on Friday to catch a train that had never left at 5:25 p.m., he waited until 10:30 p.m., having collected only a bottle of water. People were sleeping on the train when it returned at 5:40 a.m. on Saturday, he said.

“What is frustrating is that Thalys did not provide any information. That there’s a train problem, okay. But the employees on site were saying approximations, ”he complains. “It’s shameful, we pay super expensive and we have an inadmissible performance. The level of mediocrity is extreme! »

Gare du Nord in Paris, “the information panels were only in French, foreigners could not understand anything”, adds Cathleen Parsons, 34, Dutch returning from vacation in Paris. The audio announcements were inaudible, she adds.

An animal had been hit by a train coming from Brussels on Friday at 3:55 p.m., near Tournai (west of Belgium).

“There was a release of smoke and this collision caused a technical problem on the motor which required the train to stop and the electricity to be cut off,” a spokeswoman told AFP.

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