According to La Voix du Nord, three children aged 13, 11 and 8 took the train in Lille on Saturday to join their respective mothers in Rennes. But they were disembarked an hour after departure by the SNCF, which considered them illegal travelers.
However, the parents had registered the trio for the paid service “Junior et Cie”, which allows supervision by facilitators, from departure to arrival. According to the newspaper, the incident was due to check-in not being carried out at the station, which the father of two of the three children admits. “I arrived late for this recording.” But “their ticket was validated. I wanted to record them, but there were too many people.”
No recording
The SNCF, cited by La Voix du Nord, recalls that the parents arrived three minutes before departure “while it is obligatory for this service to present themselves at least one hour before”. As the children still got on board and had not been registered by “Junior et Cie”, “they were therefore not the responsibility of the on-board team”. The SNCF specifies that they were “handed over to the police at the Marne-la-Vallée station”, who contacted the parents. She “refutes all accusations” and “guarantees to have perfectly fulfilled her duties to protect the children”.
