Does one overcrowded Mons–Brussels train justify David Jeanmotte’s broadside against SNCB?

Former Brussels

Place

Brussels

Destination of the crowded train and employment centre for affected commuters.

Why it matters

Destination of the crowded train and employment centre for affected commuters.

About

The City of Brussels is the largest municipality and historical centre of the Brussels-Capital Region, as well as the capital of the French Community of Belgium, the Flemish Region, and Belgium. The City of Brussels is also the administrative centre of the European Union, as it hosts a number of principal EU institutions in its European Quarter.

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Place

Mons

Hainaut city where Jeanmotte’s reported morning rail journey began.

Why it matters

Hainaut city where Jeanmotte’s reported morning rail journey began.

About

Mons is a commune in the Var department in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region in southeastern France.

Official site ↗View source record ↗

The quarrel is unmistakably Belgian: it concerns the federal public railway, a major commuter route into the capital and the way prominent commentators use personal experiences to judge a publicly funded service. It also matters to international residents and EU staff working in Brussels because trains converging on the capital form part of their daily mobility, although no EU institution is involved in managing the service.

Jeanmotte, a familiar figure on French-speaking Belgian television, filmed passengers packed into what the reports described as a three-carriage train during the morning peak. Soirmag reported that some travellers could not board or got off again. Jeanmotte called the conditions “horrible” and “shameful”, questioned where SNCB’s public money was going and asked, with evident frustration, where additional passengers were supposed to stand. His coup de gueule gave a recognisable face to a complaint regularly heard from commuters: national averages offer little comfort when the train immediately in front of them is too short.

Hennart, the honorary former president of the French-speaking Brussels Court of First Instance and now an LN24 commentator, objected to the breadth of that criticism. His intervention, promoted by LN24 as a response to Jeanmotte giving SNCB a “bad mark”, shifted the debate from the crowded carriage to the fairness of drawing conclusions about an entire public company from a single episode. His dismissive wording also risks obscuring the legitimate passenger question: whether the train’s planned or actual composition matched expected peak demand.

That distinction is important. The federal public-service contract requires SNCB to monitor seating capacity and occupancy and to adapt train composition, rolling stock or the transport plan where overcrowding standards are exceeded structurally. It sets a ceiling under which weakened or overcrowded services should remain a small share of daily operations. A photograph or social-media video can establish that conditions were poor at a particular moment, but it cannot by itself show whether the problem was an exceptional equipment substitution or evidence of repeated under-capacity on the Mons–Brussels corridor.

SNCB’s own national figures provide Hennart’s side of the argument with context, though not a direct answer about Jeanmotte’s train. The company says it carried 207.8 million passengers in 2025 under a revised counting method, while punctuality reached 91.7%, its best result in roughly two decades excluding the pandemic years. It also reported €820 million of investment during 2025, including more than €350 million for rolling stock renewal and renovation. Those figures challenge the suggestion that public funding simply disappears without visible work.

They do not invalidate Jeanmotte’s experience. SNCB also says demand is growing and acknowledges that accurate occupancy data are essential for deciding train composition. Its service contract aims for 30% passenger growth and 10% more train supply by 2032, while the federal government has simultaneously requested €675 million in rail-sector savings over 2025–2029, according to the company’s 2025 review. The deeper issue is therefore less a choice between a celebrity and a former judge than the persistent gap between system-wide improvement and the reliability passengers encounter on a specific service.

Two questions remain unanswered: why this train operated with the reported capacity, and whether similar crowding is recurring on the route. SNCB’s explanation, if one follows, will determine whether the episode was an isolated disruption or a planning problem requiring reinforcement. Until then, Jeanmotte’s video is credible evidence of one bad journey, while Hennart is right only in the narrower sense that it is not yet evidence of the railway’s overall performance.