7 hours, 2 trips to Brussels, and 1 alarming boxed lunch

We took the train up to Amsterdam earlier this month, had a lovely (if cold) weekend, and were happily headed back to Paris when we had our first real mishap after almost two years of train travel.

We were over halfway to Paris, somewhere in rural Belgium just a few miles from the French border, when our train came to an abrupt stop.  There was a series of vague announcements about there being something wrong with the train, but it was a little hard to understand because one of the people delivering the messages did not speak French or English very well (the announcements are given in Dutch, French, and English on this line) and the other person spoke so quietly you could not really hear what they were saying.  What we could figure out was that they did not know how long we would be stopped and that all of the electricity on the train had been turned off, meaning that we were without functioning bathrooms and air conditioning.  Despite my many complaints about the lack of hot weather in northern Europe, even I did not enjoy sitting in the hot train car.

They managed to restart the electrical system on the train and decided to try going back to Brussels, which we had passed through earlier. There was an engine on each end of the train and the unused engine on the back seemed to still be working, so we were able to go backwards.  We made it to Brussels, stocked up on food and water, and they decided the engine that pulled us there would be able to make it to Paris.  This meant that we got a little tour of the outskirts of Brussels as we looped around to get the train turned around and heading south.

Part of our stop in Brussels involved the train stocking up on free meals for all of the passengers.  Our train had left a little after 2 pm and we expected to be home before 6 pm, but by the time we left Belgium for the second time it was after 7:30 pm and we were getting hungry.  J picked up our boxed meals in the bar car of the train and we excitedly opened them up. . .

. . . to find an odd assortment of things, including a jar of salmon rillettes (sort of like paté),

and a disgusting canned tuna salad.

After so many hours with people stuck on the train, part of the time without air conditioning, it was already little stuffy.  The addition of so many open cans of dubious tuna salad did nothing to help the atmosphere.  We were really glad to get off the train when we finally made it back to Paris.