THREE DAYS of travel misery eased last night on cross-Channel services, as Eurostar engineers worked to solve the puzzle of multiple breakdowns on services between London and Paris.
Empty test trains started running on the passenger Channel link, as thousands of travellers counted the cost of ruined trips.
Passengers were still being turned away at St Pancras, but the embarrassed company arranged for 500 elderly travellers and families with children to use ferries from Dover instead. Meanwhile, a marathon jam on the M20 motorway and other roads to the Channel ports also eased, with the first lorries for more than 12 hours embarking for the Continent.
Eurostar chief executive Richard Brown visited queues at St Pancras, telling frustrated customers he was “very, very sorry” and admitting that the firm’s performance had been “inadequate”.
Passengers trapped underground in trains with broken lavatories, temperatures above 25 degrees and only emergency lighting lambasted train staff’s response as “terrible”.
Specialist engineers are still uncertain why Eurostar’s usually trouble-free trains failed so disastrously, after running unaffected in previous cold snaps. The company blamed the sudden change for the high-speed engines between freezing temperatures above ground and the heat of the tunnel.
Slower freight trains on the Eurotunnel service were not affected. Experts are also expected to focus on the fact that the failures were in London-bound trains, which spend longer overground in France before the tunnel than trains going south.
“It’s all a bit of a mystery and the company, and indeed a lot of people, appear baffled by it,” said Nigel Harris, managing editor of Rail magazine. “The fact that the problem affected London-bound trains rather than ones leaving St Pancras may have been due to those heading away from London having less time to get cold.
“They pass through miles of tunnel through London and then go under the Thames and they just don’t have time to get exposed to the very cold temperatures before going into the tunnel. But what is really puzzling is that it is happening now, as the trains have been exposed to cold weather over the last few years.”
The Eurostar trains are similar to the French TGV high-speed trains, which have not suffered from cold weather problems, although they do not face the abrupt temperature contrast of the tunnel run in conditions such as those over the weekend.
Snow and ice continued to be a problem across Britain. A major artery, the A19, through Teesside, was blocked for most of yesterday by a lorry that jack-knifed on ice.
The AA had attended some 7,000 breakdowns by mid-morning yesterday, the same as during the whole of a normal Sunday.
In north Yorkshire, 50 major roads were closed for part of the day because of accidents or snow and ice.
A broken pattern of snowstorms drifted from southern Scotland and the northwest across to the North Sea coast. More snow is expected in the north and down the east coast to Kent today.
Manchester airport was forced to divert an incoming flight from Qatar to Birmingham, as staff twice cleared and de-iced the only runway in use over the Christmas period.
Police in northern counties, East Anglia and Kent appealed to people not to travel unless their journeys were essential.
The National Botanic Garden of Wales in Cardiff closed after paths were condemned as “an ice rink”. – (Guardian service)