Trouble on t'Eurostar

Bonjour my little British commuter chums, and as you might gather from the title of this post and the faux French opening, I've had a trip on the Eurostar to gay (easy!) Paris this week. Alas, not one that was free of First Great Western-style problems as I'll tell you shortly.

First, a quick catch-up on what's been happening recently.

Good news: I managed to avoid most of the flooding problems by working at home on the days that the Good Lord decreed that there should be 40-or-so days of rain all packed into a few short hours. So that was a bit of a relief.

And even more good news: I refer you to First Great Western COO Andrew Haine's latest cap-in-hand missive on the FGW website promising us double the level of compensation when we renew our season tickets because of the utter crapness of the service recently. And let's be frank here: the service has now reached dreadfulness of epic proportions - the worst I've even known it in the two years I've been a regular fixture on the Chippenham-Paddington trip. Barely any trains at all are on time. Monday's commute saw me having to catch a Swansea train that was over an hour late due to the flooding at Chipping Sodbury, and today's 9.25am was an Adelante with standing room only. Rubbish.

Anyway, enough of that dull drudgery and onto the joys of Eurostar...or perhaps not. Anyway, in what I thought would make an interesting compare-and-contract exercise for this blog, I was invited to attend a conference in Paris this week travelling in business class from the newly refurbished St Pancras. My what an attractive station that is - and no sign of piles of rotting turds on the tracks as at Paddington. (Oh, one more bit of good news: looks like they've changed the poo catchers at Paddington recently I noticed today.)

So, back to Eurostar: the outward trip was fantastic. Offers of copious quantities of booze, a reasonable meal, and on time virtually to the minute. Parfait, as they say over the Channel. This was going to be a rail experience to knock First Great Western for a six, I thought.

But then came the return journey - and the FGW gremlins appeared literally three minutes after we left Gare du Nord station en route for Blightly. The announcement was made in French first, but even with my dismal grasp of the language I knew they were asking if there was a doctor on board. Yep, we had a medical problem. The train chugged on slowly for a bit, then ground to a halt at Picardy TGV station where a pregnant woman was taken off the train and plopped into an ambulance that zoomed off in the night, Euro-sirens blaring that dee-dah dee-dah noise you get in French cop films. That was a 30 minute delay.

Next we ground to a halt somewhere near Calais due to a person being spotted on the line. Sangatte, I joked to my companion. He didn't look amused. That was another 30 minutes so we finally crawled into St P an hour late and I just missed the 8.45pm out of Paddington I'd been hoping to get.

So, clearly First Great Western is not alone in suffering the gremlins. I had hoped my jolly on the Eurostar would provide me with a heartening glimpse of how trains could be run in the 21st century. Mais, non. Perhaps the whole experience can best be summed up by the French expression: plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. Or perhaps it's just me. Am I jinxed?

Mon dieu. Au revoir my British chums.