Oh deer. An animal strike makes my trip rather Silly

Today should have been simple enough.

A TER train Nuits-sous-Ravières – Paris Bercy, a TGV Paris Nord – Lille Flandres, then SNCB IC trains Lille Flandres – Kortrijk and Kortrijk – Brugge.

But a half an hour out of Nuits, bang. The train hits something. I was in the first carriage and you really felt it. Turns out we had collided with a deer on the line.

Within 60 minutes SNCF staff were on site to inspect the train, within 75 minutes we managed to inch our way slowly the dozen or so kilometres to Laroche Migennes, the next major station. Other than the lousy information provided on board, that, it turns out, was the only part of the whole trip that was handled adequately.

Another train had waited at Laroche for the one I was on (and due to the animal strike had to be taken out of service). But I reached Paris with 70 minutes of delay.

But Paris – Lille does not run an hourly service which you would think it ought to. Not like Lille is a major city with more than a million people in its conurbation or anything.

These are the services in the middle of the day – a train every 90 minutes roughly.

Why do it like this?

To make SNCF’s life easy of course. With a trip time of 1 hour 7 minutes, you can turn around a train 23 minutes later.

So having missed the 11:41 I needed to beg my way onto the 13:12.

First stop, the SNCF Grandes Lignes ticket office, a nasty hot bunker at the -1 level in Paris Nord, surly security dude stood outside, and a harassed SNCF employee pre-sifting the queries of passengers who’d rather not have been there.

“If you wait here,” the SNCF employee told me, “you will miss the 13:12 to Lille. Go and speak to the train manager instead. Platform 14.“

Had this been Germany I’d just have gone straight to the train, but here I needed permission – first at the ticket office bunker, then at the ticket gates to the platform. The employee at the gates understood my predicament and let me through to the train manager.

“I need to take this TGV because I missed the earlier one because my TER train from Bourgogne to Paris was delayed,” I explained.

“There are no seats on here,” he replied, exuding ‘a you think it is my job to serve you and because your idiotic TER was delayed’.

That’s what you get when you run too few trains I felt like telling him, and the ones you do run are compulsory reservation. But resist Jon, resist. Just get yourself on board.

“You can stand in the bar,” he grudgingly agreed.

But then beyond Lille… those are Belgian trains. So they have an hourly Taktfahrplan (clock face timetable) to Kortrijk.

Only with a gap.

Precisely when I needed to depart Lille Flandres.

And even if I had not managed to hit the exact gap in the timetable, a 90 minute Takt into a 60 minute Takt is not going to go – so even at other times of day connections here are not going to work.

So sod it. I’ll re-route.

I had intended to travel Lille – Kortrijk – Brugge, drop off my things there, and then go to Bruxelles.

I better go straight from Lille to Bruxelles then instead. Yet given the excessive price of the handful of direct TGVs from Lille Europe, better take Belgian trains changing in Tournai instead.

Or not.

The SNCB International site shows nothing, despite there being trains every hour. The first train it will show is at 19:19 today, or tomorrow, long after I want to travel. And these trains are not compulsory reservation.

SNCF Connect meanwhile can find me some trains:

But it cannot sell me anything beyond Tournai:

Then Corentin, a follower of mine on Mastodon who regularly comes up with amazing solutions for French rail problems that should not exist, wonders whether I have tried the SNCF TER Hauts de France site.

And it works. It can sell me a ticket to Bruxelles. How the hell are you supposed to know this? It makes no sense.

But… it cannot take my Belgian Train+ card into account, so I would have to pay more.

So the solution: SNCF TER ticket Lille – Froyennes (first Belgian station), then SNCB ticket with Train+ Froyennes – Bruxelles Midi. Total cost €15,00.

But what is the point here?

First, hourly clock face timetables without gaps make sense. Trains every 90 minutes or gaps of two hours are no good to anyone.

Second, there is a lesson for the forthcoming EU ticketing reform here. For reasons unknown SNCB International simply could not sell me the ticket I needed, but with a ticket split in Froyennes I nevertheless managed to get tickets for all parts of the journey. A solution for when a “Single Ticket” is not available for some reason is going to have to be found – otherwise passengers in situations like mine today are going to be left without passenger rights.

Anyway, rather fittingly, this trip did take me through Silly (OpenRailwayMap).

Source: https://jonworth.eu/oh-deer-an-animal-strike-makes-my-trip-rather-silly/