Anti-Travel Open Thread [Y-not]

This is NOT your Travel Thread. This is just an Open Thread in which you may mock the French and talk about whatever you please until the next thread.

This thread brought to you by “How NOT to Travel”:

Train passengers in France greeted their afternoon TGV service with horror yesterday when it pulled in to the station with the body of a dead cyclist crushed onto its front.
Drivers of the Paris to Mulhouse high-speed locomotive initially failed to notice the accident in the village of Petit-Croix, near Belfort, in eastern France, on Sunday.
Shockingly, the unidentified 48-year-old victim was therefore carried for 25 miles across the French countryside on the nose of the service before it was spotted at the end of the line.

Read more at The Daily Mail Online.

Mr. Y-not alerted me to this story, which he first read about at a French publication called The Local. Courtesy of that article, I love this quote from the conductor (emphasis mine):

The driver named Michel, who knows the spot where the cyclist was killed said: “After the level crossing the track is straight, but before it there are two curves, so we see nothing at all. This is an area with speed transitions, and we have a lot of manipulation to do inside.
“So we are looking at the speed controls and at the electrical equipment,” he said. “We cannot see a pedestrian by the side of the tracks. If someone throws himself under the train we are completely helpless. This is a train, not a wheelbarrow. It cannot stop in 100 metres,” Michel added.

Does anyone else get the feeling that the driver wouldn’t have stopped even if he had time to do so? Gotta love them French public employees!

Open Thread.

posted by Open Blogger at 08:37 PM

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