“ The entire railway family is in mourning,” French railway company SCNF said in a statement after the driver died by suicide
More than 400 train passengers avoided harm on Christmas Eve after a driver jumped from the cab, leaving the train unmanned, the company says.
French national railway company SCNF told PEOPLE in a statement that the incident occurred on a high-speed line around 8 p.m. local time on Christmas Eve in the Seine-et-Marne region to the east of Paris when a train driver died by suicide “while the train was moving.”
“The entire railway family is in mourning and is very marked on this Christmas Day by this terrible tragedy,” SCNF added in the translated statement.
The company said that the train avoided disaster as it was equipped with a new technology called the “Automatic Standby with Downforce Control,” which checks to ensure that there’s an “active” driver running the train “at all times.”
The system kicked in and safely brought the train to a stop on the tracks.
The incident “severely disrupted” train traffic to the east of Paris as trains were “diverted by conventional lines in both directions,” SCNF said. This resulted in “longer travel times of around an hour and 30 minutes on average and longer delays for six TGV trains.”
The company said normal traffic resumed early on Christmas Day after “funeral directors had left the scene” and authorization was “given by the judicial police officer” to resume operations.
SNCF said all trains reached their intended location and “all customers were picked up, some by taxi.”
The train’s driver was identified by U.K. newspaper The Times as 52-year-old Bruno Rejony.
The French transport minister, Philippe Tabarot, said Rejony had been suffering from personal problems; Tabarot also praised the train’s safeguard system for saving the travelers onboard at the time of Rejony’s death.
“The driver wished to end his life in a solitary action,” Tabarot said on CNews television, per The Times. “It could have been more serious if he had wanted to derail his train.”
One of the train’s personnel told French outlet Le Parisien that they had assumed the train’s driver was incapacitated when the train came to a halt. Another recalled, “We really couldn’t understand what had happened. No one imagined the worst,” The Times reported.
A member of the train staff eventually walked up the track, forced open the driver’s door from the outside and found it empty. This prompted emergency service personnel to search for the driver, whose body was later found beside the tracks, according toThe Times.
Both SCNF and the French authorities have launched inquiries into the incident, France24 reported.