Month: December 2009

How Tunnelvisionaries at Eurostar “Missed the Train” again


Two Eurostar Trains by Austin Evan on Flickr.

Just before I hit the warm sack early this morning it became apparent through Twitter that 4 Eurostar trains had become stuck in the Chunnel, the tunnel under the Channel between Calais in France and Folkestone in the UK.

Earlier this week there had been rumors of British train drivers calling a strike because of failing salary negotiations. I wonder if the two items are connected.

Three trains from France to the United Kingdom were involved and one from the UK to France. At least 2,000 people were stuck in their trains. Moreover after they were hauled out of the Chunnel,  some people even were stuck in a train in Folkestone for another 7 hours making their trip a 15 hr horror journey without being at the destination. The official reading is a failed electricity system because it was cold outside and warm in the tunnel.

A Dutch paper suggested this week that the operators of railroads in the European Alps, the Nordic countries or Canada would laugh their ass off when they would read what the Dutch railroad operators presented as excuses for trains not operating as they should. Now they can add Eurostar as yet another laughingstock.

Tech Crunch has a thoughtful article about it: As hundreds of Eurostar passengers languish, Eurostar ignores Twitter They could have used Twitter, but didn’t think of it.

The main fail is that they didn’t show any compassion for their passengers and also apparently didn’t think about the relatives of passengers who were waiting in the cold at both ends of the journey without being informed in one way or another. No news was provided. Management seemed sound asleep. Same attitude seemed have been the rule in the case of the train that had a truck on board that got on fire in September 2008.

Today all trains to and from the UK were cancelled.

Customer Service, Marketing and PR should have been be married into one voice Marck Pack claims and rightfully so.  Note I chose the same photo by accident before I red his post.

When I travel from the continent to the UK I usually prefer to travel by car an then tend to prefer a ferry above a cartrain through the Chunnel. Only the idea you can swim instead of being burried or chocked in a tunnel does it for me. But I have taken the car train a couple of times because my fellow travelers prefer a train over a ferry because they get easy seasick. What can you do…

I’m a bit focused on the Eurostar because of the ticket incident with the Thalys, the Amsterdam – Brussels leg of the Eurostar that I described last week.

Update
Dan Beck Daniele Becari, a frequent Eurostar traveler commented here: Eurostar PR Fallout

I was reading through @Coletteballou‘s tweets and found the following highly interesting observation:

Colette-Ballou---Claudia-Schiffer-got-out-before-the-masses
Now that is good PR: Apparently Claudia Schiffer got out of the mess before the masses…”Quot licet Iovi…”

Now more incidents showing the same attitude are being mentioned on several places.

Update 2 – Eurotunnel saved Eurostar???
@Railservice, a twitter account maintained by three Swiss Public Transport employees pointed me to the following harnessed Press Release where Eurotunnel claimed it had saved Eurostar:

Eurotunnel rescues Eurostar
Overnight from Friday 18 to Saturday 19 December Eurotunnel staff went to the assistance
of 5 Eurostar trains which had broken down in the Channel Tunnel, following technical
failures. These incidents were in no way due to the Tunnel infrastructure.
Eurotunnel staff:

  • Rescued 5 Eurostar trains which had lost traction
  • Evacuated 1,364 Eurostar passengers and brought them to the surface in Folkestone, Kent, using their own trains, where they were able to continue their journey to London
  • Towed 2 Eurostars to St Pancras as Eurostar did not have the means to do so themselves*

Pascal Sainson, Eurotunnel Operations Director, commented: “In very difficult conditions Eurotunnel made the decision to assist the Eurostar trains and their passengers. In order to conduct these operations in complete safety, Eurotunnel mobilised substantial extra staff and technical resources and also made the decision to interrupt its own services. Eurotunnel has done everything it can to resolve the situation”.
Traffic in the Channel Tunnel has been progressively returning to normal since 05:40 CET this morning.
In anticipation of heavy traffic this weekend Eurotunnel had already instigated its BAR Programme (Busy And Ready). In particular a fleet of snow ploughs and road clearing vehicles has been operating to clear snow from the terminal in Coquelles, France to reduce
the impact of the current severe weather in northern France.
Eurotunnel is however not responsible for the condition of the motorways.
Eurotunnel has put in place an organisation to help passengers to cross the Channel even if they arrive late at the departure terminal.
* Eurotunnel locomotives and Shuttles are prepared and maintained so that they are not affected by rapid temperature changes.

This at least teaches me that the car shuttles and the Eurostar trains are operated by two separate companies that I wasn’t aware of.

The final quote is the statement that has been haunting me all day today and yesterday: From own experience that the Swiss operate trains that enter tunnels that have extreme temperature differences with the outside. Frequently I have used use the Lötschberg car shuttle between Kandersteg and Goppenstein when traveling to the Rhone valley in Switserland. There It can be minus 10 or minus 20 Celsius outside, while the tunnel temperature is plus 14 to plus 16 degrees Celcius. In addition passenger trains from Bern to Milan used to use the same tunnel without these kind of things happening. I take it there is no difference since the passenger trains are now using the new Lötschberg Basis Tunnel as of 2007. Moreover they have many other tunnels with the same phenomenon…So I have a serious question about the Eurostar trains failing under these circumstances.

Moreover. When I find the quotes regarding prior incidents with poor communication again I’ll repeat them here.

Last edited by Happy Hotelier on December 21, 2009 at 12:20 am

Top Ten Travel Blogs – Technorati vs Invesp

Top-Ten-Travel-Blogs-according-to-Invesp

Those who follow this blog, know that I have spent quite some time with manually putting together top lists of travel bloggers according to Technorati in the past. The last one I published over a year ago on my TList page and for prior lists you can check out in my Tlist Category:

  1. The 300 of Halloween last year. which is also at the TList page
  2. The Update of January last year
  3. The update of December, 2007 ah but that post doesn’t give you a list itself…
  4. That of November, 2007

I did pray that someone would come up with a better measurement to replace my dumb work. Moreover at the time Technorati seemed too outdated and too infested with scrapers and sploggers and what all.

In June I discovered Frothy‘s Alexa only ranking.

Then came Invesp. I mentioned it already back in July, that put several measurement methods in a basket and created its own list of Top Travel Blogs.

From time to time I checked those and had a good reason not to go further with my own cumbersome list making.

But now Technorati has really cleaned its act and rolled out a completely new approach in their Blog ranking. I have a feeling that they are moving in the same direction as Google search is moving. A nice way of reinventing yourself Technorati!

Each ranking has its own pros and contras, but if you want to quickly orientate yourself about influential travelblogs you can have a look at both lists and make your pick, while I can concentrate on other content here:-)

Blogger Hopping – Meeting Gary Arndt

Blogger Hopping – Meeting Gary Arndt

I’m a passionate about people and always want to know more about people who interest me. Whenever possible, I try to connect in real life with the travel bloggers who I have met online already. So when I learned that Gary Arndt, the celebrity travel blogger of Everything Everywhere was passing through The Netherlands I jumped on the occasion and asked him to come along for a chat when time would permit. I had featured Gary already in my 10 Questions For” series in November of 2008 so from time to time we have online contact ever since.

The first photo proudly shows the result of this meeting: Gary in the garden of our little gem Haagsche Suites on July 3, 2009. The same garden that forms the logo of this blog. Off course asking attention for Haagsche Suites is one of the aims of this blog.

BTW Blogger Hopping is a term invented by Benji Lanyado.

Unfortunately we experienced a couple of Fails.

First Fail

At the time Gary was relying on his Ipod with WiFi connection to have contact with the outside world. Mostly through twitter. Much cheaper than the regular Iphone he has acquired since. So the meeting point was supposed to be a train station in The Hague. The problem being there are two important train stations in the Hague. Although I had tweeted to him that I was to pick him up at Den Haag HS – HS stands for Hollands Spoor from the time there were two separate railway companies serving The Hague – or Den Haag in Dutch- around 12.30, he apparently missed that tweet and didn’t show up. I waited about two hours hoping he would have an opportunity to connect via Twitter and I was checking my Blackberry every 5 minutes. After I had returned home he came trough on twitter as he had found some Internet café in the city. I collected him in the city. Clearly he had been waiting at the other station…Den Haag Centraal Station…all in all we lost 3 hours.

Second Fail
Clearly the second Fail is the fact that there is no free WiFi in the trains and neither in the train stations of the Netherlands. However, recently Dutch Government has announced that they will set aside funds to enable trains to have free WiFi in the Dutch trains.

Third, fourth and fifth Fail

  • Two days before I had picked up my new camera, a Canon Eos 5D II that I had ordered to enable me to make a killer back up photoshoot of the great wedding of the daughter of dear friends in that weekend. Mighty proud I was to show it off to Gary. Off course I wanted to use it when Gary and I roamed The Hague. The day before I had already shot some photos on a flash card that came with the camera. Very unfortunately it appeared later that day that that flash card (white label) was not functioning correctly. Despite several trials and errors almost all photos of that second and third July went down the drain. Luckily I noticed it before the wedding
  • Gary stayed overnight and obviously he Liked that part of his stay. Unfortunately I had to pull away for a formal dinner party that evening and had almost no time to chat with Gary as I would have liked. The next day I made up with a little Den Haag high lights tour
  • Only recently some of the photos came up again, because I had written the recovered photos into an obscure map somewhere on my computer that I lost remembrance of during the busy summer months. Hence this post appears only now.

Sixth Fail: big annoying Thalys Fail

Gary was on his way to London and wanted to make the trip with Eurostar. The first leg of that trip goes with Thalys, a train between Amsterdam and Paris. He had to change train in Brussels South station. As of yesterday the Thalys does take a new route that skips The Hague entirely. Gary had somehow managed to book an Internet ticket through a European site of Eurostar. When I brought him to the station the ticket office there refused to change his voucher for a ticket, claiming they couldn’t do that because it was an (“Invalid?”) European ticket. How stupid and how embarrassed I felt about this. I talked with the train’s supervisor and pushed Gary into an earlier train that the one he was scheduled to take, because that was delayed and waiting for that could mean Gary missing the EuroStar from Brussels to London. Later I heard from Gary that he finally got his ticket in Brussels….

Later, In September I had a similar annoying experience with the Thalys. We had a group booking from Rotterdam, but I was not allowed to buy a separate leg from The Hague to Rotterdam, notwithstanding the fact that the Thalys then still stopped in the Hague. WiFi in the Thalys is horrible expensive and finally when the group entyered the Thalys in Rotterdam it appeared their booking system was totally belly up as our whole wagon had its seats double booked. It was for the calmness of the supervisor who patiently gave everybody a seat in another wagon that there was no row at all.

Well luckily we were not so unfortunate as the partridge taken by a Thalys of the photo in Paris:-)

Post Alia
These fails put a shadow over this meeting, but after all Gary and I will always have a good story to share and the longer ago the series of fails happen the more likely you are to have fun over it with and a good laugh…forgetting the aggravations.

This is a Dutch Mars Ad which says in Dutch – directly to Gary now-: nevertheless – “Twas fun, next time again?”

Last edited by Happy Hotelier on December 7, 2016

In Action at the 2009 Dutch Bloggies Awards Gala

Happy Hotelier in Action at 2009 Dutch Bloggies Awards

The guy, Roelof de Vries of 360 Foto, who took the amazing dizzying 360 Degree shots from which I took this cutting was standing next to me when I was taking photos of the 2009 Dutch Bloggies Awards Gala.
Probably I was standing in his way while wondering about him using his tripod, until I saw the result over at the Dutch Bloggies site.

I had a special interest to go and see the Awards, because it was only 5 minutes away from where I live and work in The Hague. It was sponsored by The Hague. But most importantly my significant other blog Chair blog had made it into the final 5 from which the jury choose the winning blog in the category Art, Culture and Entertainment blogs of the Dutch Bloggies. I must admit this nerd was a bit excited albeit skeptical.

Here is the complete Awards List at Dutch Bloggies. I do hope they complete the short lists of all categories.

The Winner NRCNext.NL of the over all award choose this photo as their award portrait.

NRCNEXT NL Wins 2009 Dutch Bloggies over all Award

And my direct competitor and winner in the category Art, Culture and Entertainment blogs, Mick! choose several among which:
Mick!

I’ve given priority to uploading my photo stream and have now to run to do some hotel duties before I can flesh out my observations.

In the meantime do head overt to my Flickr set 2009 Dutch Bloggies Awards in The Hague and please do help me people tag those Dutch Blogging Nerds.

More to follow!