In Belgium and The Netherlands there have been works since a few years already to create a new high speed line for international and national high speed trains, the HSLSouth in The Netherlands. In February/March 2006 a train already arrived at a speed record of 331,1 km/h on this line. In The Netherlands, this line will be exploited by the High Speed Alliance (HSA), a joint venture of NS (the Dutch railway company) and KLM (the Dutch airline company, now merged wit ...
Last Thursday, September 21st, 2006, the SNCF (the French railway company) proposed a special promotion because of the 25th anniversary of the TGV (high speed train): from 12:00 they proposed to sell 50.000 train tickets for a single journey within France, no matter what distance, for only €5.
And we knew they did ... as everyone expected just before 12:00 the reserverations website of the SNCF indicated Notre service de réservation de billets est momentanément inaccessible. Nous vous prions de nous en excuser et vous invitons à renouveler votre visite ultérieurement and it also included the webserver error message Too many users ...
The reservation service by phone also almost collapsed under the exceptionally high number of calls and many people who called had to listen to the message en ra ...