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June 30, 2007Paris: Low-lightsProblems with trains/ticketsWhen I first arrived to the Paris CDG RER B station on my way into the city centre hotel, since I knew that I needed to commute back and forth to the airport over the next 3 days, I decided to purchase a 3 day tourist ticket for 38 euros, which is supposed to work on all RER, Metro and buses in the five zones of Paris. For some reason, the ticket only worked for 24 hours at a time and I kept having to bring it to the ticket desk to get it renewed for another 24 hour period every time it expired. Luckily, I held onto the little ticket holder they had given me because that had the ticket number imprinted on it and from there, they were able to prove it was a 3 day ticket. The price or number of days the ticket was for was NOT printed on the ticket itself, which was a bit strange and if I didn't have the ticket holder, I probably would not have been able to get the ticket re0issued for the second 24 hours. Another issue that I had with trains on this trip, I was travelling onwards to Brussels from Paris so during one of the lunch breaks, I went to the Grand Lignes TGV station at CDG and purchased a ticket from Paris CDG train station to Brussels Midi. I noticed when booking this, that there seems to be fewer trains going now directly from Paris CDG to Brussels Midi as there used to be. I seem to recall a train every two hours but now there only seems to be 3 or 4 per day. When I bought the ticket out in CDG train station, I noticed that I had purchased the ticket from SCNF, the French railway system. When it came time to leave, I realised that it would probably be easier if I travelled directly from Paris Nord instead of going out to the airport again since I was leaving directly from my hotel. I decided to get off at Paris Nord and try to change my ticket there. As I had a first class ticket, I figured it would be no problem. To my surprise, it was a major problem. I was told at Paris Nord that I would have to buy a whole new ticket from Thalys to get the earlier train to Brussels. I decided against doing that obviously and had to get back on the RER B train and go out to the airport train station and I caught my originaly scheduled train from there. The only thing I can conclude is that SCNF and Thalys do not seem to be linked now, whereas I used to think that they were somehow. So one needs to be careful about this inconsistency when booking trains around Paris. |
