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Rail traffic through the Channel Tunnel gradually resumed on Wednesday with more cancellations and delays as power failures left thousands of passengers stranded and some stranded in powerless trains overnight.
Two London-Paris trains were canceled and most journeys in both directions were delayed as Eurostar warned of “impacts” on New Year’s Eve.
Christel Renouf, her husband and two children arrived in Paris after boarding the 19:01 train for the journey from London to Paris, which took 12 hours longer than expected.
“After boarding, the train first stopped for an hour because there were not enough staff, then it stopped just before the tunnel because an overhead line had fallen on a carriage,” he said at the French capital’s Gare du Nord railway station.
They spent the night in the train “without electricity, water or WiFi,” he said.
“An overhead line has fallen on a Eurostar train linking London and Paris, near the entrance to the Channel Tunnel,” a spokesman said.
New Year travelers struggled to find alternatives on Tuesday after the operator suspended all services between London, Paris, Amsterdam and Brussels.
But Eurostar said on Wednesday that services had resumed today “following a power problem in the Channel Tunnel yesterday and some further problems with rail infrastructure overnight”.
It added that “some delays may occur and last-minute cancellations are also possible”.
One man told the BBC that he boarded the 19:01 train to Paris on Tuesday, but at 3:00 am on Wednesday he was still sitting on the train at the tunnel entrance.
France’s BFMTV reported that passengers had to wait overnight on a train from London to Lille without electricity, heating or working toilets.
“None of the electricity is working. It’s always the same notification that there is a serious problem,” a passenger named Hervé told the broadcaster from the train. The train reached Lille on Wednesday morning with a delay of 11 hours.
– ‘Pretty stressful’ –
An AFP correspondent said a train departed Wednesday morning in London, while passengers boarded another train.
British DJ Nathan Denyer said he had hardly slept and was very anxious about arriving in the French city of Dijon on time to play a set at a New Year’s Eve party.
“It’s quite stressful today, even though the service is clearly running,” he said inside London’s St Pancras International station.
Wafa Chara, a France-based engineer, said she was hoping to get back home in time for her family plans.
“We’re really stressed,” he said. He said that he and his fellow passengers had reached the station four hours earlier.
Eurostar on Tuesday warned passengers to postpone their journeys to a different date and warned of serious delays as well as last-minute cancellations.
As well as the power problem, the Lestral train also failed in the Channel Tunnel, a 31-mile undersea rail link between Folkestone in England and the Calais region in France.
Lechtal operates vehicle-carrying trains between Folkestone in southeast England and Calais in northern France.
– high demand –
Driven by visitor demand for the Olympics and Paralympics in Paris, a record-high 19.5 million passengers traveled on Eurostar last year, up almost five percent on 2023.
Eurostar has had a monopoly on passenger services through the tunnel linking Britain and France since it opened in 1994.
But British entrepreneur Richard Branson, the creator of Virgin Airlines, has vowed to launch a rival service.
Italy’s Trenitalia has also said it intends to compete with Eurostar on the Paris-London route by 2029.
Tuesday’s disruption was the latest to hit Eurostar, at a time when the company has faced criticism over its high prices, particularly on the Paris-London route.
An electrical fault in August led to the cancellation of Eurostar services and serious delays to other services.
The theft of cables on railway tracks in northern France caused problems for two days in June.
bur-ah/kjm
This article was generated from an automated news agency feed without any modifications to the text.
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