THE WRONG sort of snow. It ranks with “leaves on the line” in the annals of the “best of” British rail management lame excuses. And, apparently, it is true of what happened to the high-speed Eurostar trains between France, Belgium and Britain over the weekend. Some 125,000 people were left stranded and 2,000 trapped in considerable discomfort for up to 16 hours under the channel without food, water or light.
There is a hoary old myth that the Eskimos' Inuit language has 60 names for snow – it largely arises from a misunderstanding of the nature of "polysynthetic" languages, as the Inuit language can form very long words by adding multiple descriptive affixes. Nevertheless, Inuit has a name for what appears to have caused the Eurostar trains to come to a halt: nutagak, a powdery snow, described by the company as lighter and "fluffier" than usual. To prevent crystals saturating the electrics, the trains have breathable membranes over ventilation grilles which were penetrated by the nutagak. It then melted when the trains entered the warm tunnels, short-circuiting the electrics.
It doesn’t rain but it snows, and for operator Eurostar Group Ltd, which will struggle to move its 40,000 backlog of passengers by Christmas, and with only two-thirds of trains now running again, natural causes were compounded by a PR disaster of its own making.
Desperate and in many cases frightened passengers on the trains and those at stations waiting for them, found Eurostar staff unable or unwilling to help. Much credit for reassuring and organising passengers goes to three off-duty police officers. Eurostar says it could not communicate with staff because all communications inside the tunnel are handled by tunnel company Eurotunnel. And Eurostar did not have the engines needed to pull the disabled trains from the tunnel. The chaos, it is clear, was waiting to happen.
To make matters worse chief executive Richard Brown apologised when he appeared on BBC breakfast television but then went on to infuriate his distressed customers by minimising the experience, stating everything had been done to make passengers comfortable. He insisted: “I’m not pretending it went well. I’m saying it went rather better than actually quite a few people are saying”.
Travellers on what has become a vital link between Britain and mainland Europe since it opened 15 years ago deserve better. There is probably an Inuit word for service too.