the essential
TGV traffic was severely disrupted during the night from Tuesday to Wednesday due to a “personal accident”. A possible “act of suicide” by a train driver could be behind the Christmas Eve disruptions.
TGV traffic on the South-East high-speed line, which was very disrupted at the end of the evening on Tuesday December 24 due to a “personal accident”, gradually resumed on Wednesday morning, we learned from the SNCF.
According to a source close to the investigation on Wednesday morning, the driver of a train jumped off in the early evening, causing delays for around ten trains on New Year's Eve. His lifeless body was discovered a little later.
On Wednesday, the Melun public prosecutor's office (Seine-et-Marne) indicated that “the first findings seem to suggest an act of suicide by the driver of a TGV train”. Before adding that “automatic railway safety procedures ensured the train stopped”. Tuesday, Christmas Eve evening, around ten TGVs were delayed following a “personal accident”, announced the SNCF.
“Thousands of passengers” stranded
We were going to spend Christmas as a family with my nephews, my brother-in-law and my sister-in-law. It’s wasted, it’s dead,” Gertrude laments to BFMTV. The traveler who was traveling between Lyon and Paris on Tuesday, December 24, is one of the thousands of people who found themselves stranded on board the dozen trains affected by significant delays on New Year's Eve.
Because TGV traffic on the South-East high-speed line was disrupted during the night from Tuesday to Wednesday.
Around ten TGVs are affected with around an hour delay, but all will go to their destination, said the SNCF in a press release. On its website, the SNCF indicates that due to this incident, delays could be up to 1 hour 30 minutes. But the indicative times noted around midnight for three trains suggest up to three to five hours of delay.
At the end of the evening, the estimates are less optimistic: the TGV Inoui Brussels-Lyon n°9844 should be three hours late, the delay in the arrival of the Ouigo Paris-Lyon Perrache n°7805 estimated at 4h40 and the TGV and the Inoui Montpellier-Paris n°6206 could be 5 hours late.
“The trains take another route in both directions, which leads to longer travel times of around 1 hour to 1 hour 30 minutes” for the TGV Inoui and Ouigo traveling in the sector, indicates the SNCF.
“Certain trains are blocked and will have to wait for traffic to resume on the High Speed Line,” she specifies, adding that a resumption of traffic was planned for the end of the evening, in a message published shortly after midnight.
The SNCF indicates in a message to travelers that “the firefighters are on the scene” of the accident. In total, “several thousand passengers” spent part of their New Year’s Eve on the trains.
