“Cockroaches on the air vents under the windows, no air conditioning in the middle of a heat wave.
Foul-smelling toilets… It was the worst train journey of my life”, enumerates with disgust Christiane, a Lyonnaise in her sixties who took a TGV Ouigo between Lyon (Rhône) and Paris, at the end of June.
She who admits to taking the train only rarely, not sure that this misadventure will make her choose the rail in the future.
A misadventure which unfortunately does not surprise Abdelkader Bensadoun, secretary of the CGT-Cheminots of the Lyon-Perrache station.
In a press release dated August 11, his union sounded the alarm on the conditions of transport in the low-cost TGVs of the SNCF.
"The passage in the maintenance workshop is very short"
“Ouigo trains cover many more kilometers than conventional TGVs, in order to be as profitable as possible,” he explains.
In addition to that, the fleet of 38 trains is undersized to ensure all the planned routes.
Their time in the maintenance workshop is therefore very short.
This does not solve all the problems of insalubrity or technical failure.
The cheap price of TGV Ouigo tickets from the SNCF does not therefore seem without counterparts.
A car of train 774 (Paris - Lyon) would concentrate most of the concerns listed by the CGT since the beginning of the summer: out of service toilets, larvae, cockroaches, defective air conditioning... The SNCF is surprised by the controversy.
It claims to have treated the wagon concerned at the end of July and minimizes the air conditioning problems which would only affect one percent of its trains.
Two agents of the company however exercised their right of withdrawal on August 4, refusing to work in the degraded hygienic conditions of train 774.