The TGV which is to bring many European parliamentarians back to Brussels at the end of the plenary session held this week in Strasbourg, suffered damage and passengers found themselves stranded in the station.
“A release of smoke on the engine” led to the evacuation of a train and the platforms of the Strasbourg station, the press service of the French public railway company SNCF told AFP, which is not aware of any “ not yet” the origin.
“At 2:45 p.m. I saw an explosion in the TGV locomotive with a big cloud of smoke coming out,” Emmanuel Foulon, a parliamentary attaché who is part of the “caravan” of elected officials, explained to AFP commuting between Brussels and Strasbourg one week a month. “It went boom! Three minutes later, we received a message saying that the train had to be emptied and that passengers had to move towards the exit.
“The firefighters arrived. I think it’s more of a technical problem than anything else. It’s weird because there was the explosion. but no one really seemed to react much. It was at the front of the train and it’s a very, very long train, it’s the one that connects the Strasbourg Parliament to Brussels. It went rather calmly, things are going well, everyone is good.”
The station, where many passengers were waiting, was not evacuated. The SNCF was not immediately able to provide further details on the new departure time of the special TGV. According to an AFP journalist, the majority of trains are shown late departing from Strasbourg.
In October 2023, a switching error had already sent the European parliamentarians’ TGV to Disneyland, causing a 45-minute delay on arrival in Strasbourg.
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