Today's award goes to the Eurotunnel employee or employees responsible for offloading passengers and their vehicles from the rail shuttle service between England and France. The Daily Mail reports:
Passengers looking forward to a day out in France as their train pulled into Calais found themselves on their way home again rather sooner than they expected - after train bosses forgot to let them off.
Around 20 Eurotunnel passengers had travelled on the Shuttle from Folkestone to Calais in seven vehicles loaded behind a wagon that had been left empty after an earlier fuel spill.
Eurotunnel staff at Calais unloaded the front vehicles from the train but were completely unaware that there were another seven cars behind the empty wagon.
The unfortunate occupants ended up making their premature 40-minute return journey to Folkestone where red-faced Eurotunnel managers greeted them, apologised and sent them on their way to Calais again on the next available train.
The passengers, who had originally left Folkestone at 8.50am last Saturday, were given a refund and also a free crossing in the future.
A Eurotunnel spokesman said today: 'We have apologised profusely. Something like this has never happened before in our 16- year history and it's very embarrassing for us.'
There's more at the link.
I'm still trying to figure out how Eurotunnel staff could possibly have been "completely unaware that there were another seven cars behind the empty wagon". I mean . . . they're railroad cars! Great honking big things! Just how do you miss 'em, unless you're blind as a bat?
Peter
2 comments:
Peter,
I agree with the sentiment, but think you are confusing English with English. 'Seven cars' refers to motor vehicles; the train car is a wagon.
It's still pretty stupid, but I can see how it happened. It's a good thing there was not any sort of emergency, as apparently no one knew what the manifest of the train was. (I would also point out that there have been fires and emergency evacuations inside this tunnel before.)
They probably load the wagons in order from the front of the line behind the engine. The train carries extra wagons since they will have many different load factors during a day of service. When the workers get to the first empty car they expect they are done offloading.
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