Without drivers, the train removes TER – L’Express

Occupation unattractive or poor management of human resources of the SNCF? The railway company will temporarily remove TER regional express trains in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie and Aquitaine-Limousin-Poitou-Charentes, including lack of having been able to recruit enough drivers.

A temporary suspension of a few weeks, called “transportation plan suitable”, which runs from February 29 to April 16 in Picardy and 7 March to 16 April for the Nord-Pas-de-Calais . Some trains will be replaced by buses, but not systematically. Questioned by AFP, the SNCF minimizes the magnitude of these losses and ensures that the PTA regarding “less than 0.5%” of its customers and that only “an average of 30 trains per day on 1,250 trains” are concerned.

A complicated recruitment

Why the railway company have to delete trains? According to the latter, it is a problem of recruitment and training of drivers. On the one hand, training is long (about 18 months) and, secondly, most of the candidates drop out before reaching the end. “To have a candidate who reaches the end of his training, we need 200 application files,” explains Céline Czernak, head of press relations at SNCF Mobility for the region.

According to her, half the candidates abandon their training when they learn working conditions (irregular hours, etc.). Moreover, the failure rate to the training itself increases because it requires a good learning part by heart. Finally, the failure rate of medical tests, too, important because of the larger detection psychotropic or cannabis consumption.

Such deleted in the Ardennes trains?

On Sunday, the PS deputy of the Ardennes, Christophe Léonard, is mounted to the plate to denounce train deletions in his region, which he attributes to the posting losses “of 10 Ardennes drivers in Ile-de-France”. In a statement, he scratches the SNCF: “This is actually the result of poor management of the SNCF, which did not recruit enough drivers in 2014 and now finds itself incapable of ensuring all its operations in the country. ”