On trains

As someone who commuted into London from Surrey before escaping to France, I was intrigued when Jonathan came back from his weekly trip to the office in Paris yesterday with a sorry story about dreadful delays on his way there. His tale of being stuck behind a broken down train and then being shunted backwards and forwards down suburban sidelines before arriving an hour and three quarters late would strike a chord with anyone who commuted on South West trains in the late 1990’s. Giving credit where credit is due, though, things had improved by the time I abandoned the commuting life.

But it wasn’t the similarity with horror stories from England which struck me, but rather the difference in the way customers were treated afterwards. Jonathan was completely gobsmacked when he and his fellow passengers were greeted on the concourse at Gare de l’Est by an army of SNCF staff handing out forms to enable the weary passengers to claim compensation for the delay.

How different from my Dad’s experience when he came over to visit us from England for the New Year. We made the mistake of booking his travel for 27^th Dec, after a Christmas engineering-fest on the line into Waterloo. His journey, which usually takes an hour, took about three so he was too late to have any chance of catching his connecting train to us from Lille, as there’s only one TGV per day serving that route. Unsurprisingly there were no South West trains staff ready and waiting with claim forms when his train did eventually arrive! When I later checked whether there was anything we could claim I drew a blank; as far as South West Trains were concerned they did all they needed to do by getting him to Waterloo, and how long it took to do this and any resulting problems were not considered.

But it would be wrong to give the impression that everything’s rosy with the trains over here. The Eurostar staff at Waterloo were incredibly helpful when my Dad had these problems in December, and I’ve always found the English Eurostar people incredible helpful whenever I’ve rung them (which is quite often, given we often help friends and family change their arrangements for coming to see us). I wish I could say the same about the Eurostar people at Gare du Nord this week.

My Dad comes to see us every couple of months and I’m really proud that he’s undaunted by doing the journey on his own, even though he’s well over 60 (he probably wouldn’t thank me for revealing his age on the world wide web but he was born in 1920). He had a great couple of weeks here with us and I accompanied him back to Paris on the first leg of his return trip last Thursday.

There was a bit of a spanner in the works when we discovered he’d lost his return Eurostar ticket. The really helpful chap on the Eurostar helpline told me that the ticket office in Paris could produce a duplicate ticket for a small charge. But it would have been even more helpful if he’d also told us to avoid lunchtime on Thursday 22^nd March because that’s when his Paris colleagues would be entering the French customer non-service awards.

If you know the Eurostar ticket office at Gare du Nord, you’ll know that there are two doors into the same ticket hall, one for business class passengers and one for the rest of us, with service desks designated for each passenger group. Even without that insider knowledge you can probably picture the scene – practically no-one in the business class queue and about twenty squeezed into the two metres between the head of the pleb queue and the door. As each transaction was taking about ten minutes and it was less than an hour before the next departure, everyone was getting pretty antsy. Now, I’m a great fan of the French commitment to proper lunch breaks and think much of the UK’s work-related stress would be resolved it we did the same but when first one and then another of the clerks went off for lunch and their replacements took some time to appear it did increase stress levels in our queue!

We were pretty relieved when we got to the head of the queue after about 20 minutes but these people were pretty serious about those customer non-service awards so our ordeal was by no means over. After explaining that the ticket was lost and that the Eurostar customer service centre had told us that we could get a replacement from the Paris ticket desk, the service agent went off to the back office, presumably to check with a manager. She was back after about 5 minutes, to confirm what we’d already told her. Then her colleague at the next desk arrived back from her break and so they had a bit of a chat. They perfectly judged how long to carry on with this because she started stamping papers in the way that only French people can do at just the point when my fairly high tolerance level was breached and I’d formulated in my head what I was going to say to get her back to the job in hand. After a few more clicks of the mouse she handed over the new ticket, a handwritten form detailing that the original ticket had been lost and a third, rather strange document which pretended to be a ticket to Calais but was, she assured us, really the receipt for the 23 euros we’d just paid for this experience. All in all about 15 minutes to do something which sounded so simple when I spoke to Eurostar on the phone!

After all that I’ll be disappointed if the Gare du Nord Eurostar ticket office don’t win one of those awards after the grief we went through to help them.