About 2,500 passengers spent hours trapped in the undersea Channel Tunnel linking France and Britain this morning after four trains broke down due to freezing weather conditions.
Angry travellers said they had been left with no power, air conditioning, food or water. Eurostar said the breakdowns occurred when the trains moved from the cold outside temperatures into the warmer tunnel.
Temperatures at the French port of Calais, where the tunnel is located on the French side, were as low as -2 Celsius accompanied by snowfall. In the French capital Paris, temperatures were down to -4C.
"It is very, very difficult when you do have extreme weather conditions," said a spokeswoman for Eurostar, operated by French rail operator SNCF, its Belgian counterpart SNCB and British government-owned LCR.
"It's not very easy when you are in an environment like the Channel Tunnel to effect rescues quickly." A rescue locomotive and a shuttle train were used to move passengers out of the 51 km (32 mile) tunnel, the longest undersea subway in the world which conveys about 40,000 people a day between Britain and continental Europe.
Passengers accused Eurostar of doing little to help them. "There was very, very poor communication from the staff," said Lee Godfree who was returning to Britain with his family from Disneyland Paris.
He said passengers had been forced to get off a broken down train themselves and had moved through the service tunnel in the dark, before getting onto a "filthy" car transport train.
“We've had children asleep on the floor, they've been sick, we had one loo (toilet), it's been a complete nightmare,” he told BBC radio. "We had people fainting on the train.
It was just pandemonium." Eurostar said it had cancelled all its services today because of the severe weather and said passengers would be offered compensation or refunds.
"We fully accept that it was not acceptable for those passengers that were affected and we will be doing our own full investigation to see how we can do better in the future," the Eurostar spokeswoman said.
Last year, the tunnel, which opened in 1994, was shut for two days after a large fire broke out on a freight train, while a blaze in 1996 fire halted freight traffic for seven months.
Heavy snowfalls across southeastern England yesterday had already brought chaos to road, rail and air passengers.
London's Gatwick and Luton Airports were closed for many hours while flights were cancelled at Heathrow and Stansted, the capital's two other major airports.
Budget airline EasyJet said it had cancelled more flights today because of the bad weather, with forecasters at Britain's Met Office predicting further snow showers today with temperatures falling as low as minus 10 degrees Celsius.
Reuters