DAYS OF travel agony for up to 30,000 Eurostar Channel Tunnel rail passengers should end today, but tens of thousands more will fail to make the journey for the Christmas holidays, the company has conceded.
Eurostar management, reeling from increasingly bitter criticism from passengers who were left stranded under the channel, or for days at stations in London and Paris, were yesterday carpeted by both the French and British governments.
In Paris, French president Nicolas Sarkozy ordered the company to get services back running, while the British government demanded that it have first access to an engineer’s report into the trains’ mechanical failures – not the company’s board.
The Anglo-French company hopes to carry 27,000 passengers today – not the usual 50,000, but the backlog has built up since problems began on Friday when five trains broke down in the tunnel. Up to 125,000 have reserved bookings between London, Paris and Brussels.
The backlog will not be cleared in time for Christmas, Eurostar chief executive Richard Brown told reporters at the St Pancras International station in London, where delayed passengers were quick to vent their fury.
Thousands who left London for Folkestone terminal in a bid to travel via Eurotunnel – which operates the tunnels themselves and runs train car-shuttles – failed when the company said it was booked out and could not cope with traffic chaos at the terminal.
All Eurostar trains, which have run for 15 years without a similar crisis, are fitted with winter equipment in November. Managers have blamed a “fluffier” type of snow for entering the trains’ undercarriages and melting inside the tunnel as temperatures rose, thus short-circuiting the electrics.
“It seems to be a strange combination of factors. It was the amount of snow, which was higher than we experienced before, it was lighter than normal, fluffier, and the temperature inside the tunnel and the humidity was higher than normal,” said Nick Mercer, a company director.
An urgent review has been ordered by the company led by Christopher Garnett, former chief executive of GNER and formerly commercial director of Eurotunnel, and a French counterpart.
Poor communications between Eurostar and Eurotunnel is being blamed in part for the crisis, since neither company has been able to explain how five trains broke down inside the tunnel before services were stopped.
Ryanair – which is offering £99 (€111) one-way flights from Stansted to Beauvais, outside Paris – and other airlines have moved to fill some of the gaps created by the Eurostar crisis. British Airways has deployed Boeing 747s on its Heathrow/Charles De Gaulle route. Flybe has increased its London/Paris services, while ferry company PO laid on a fleet of coaches to take 500 Eurostar passengers from Dover to Calais – with the bill paid by Eurostar.
The crisis may yet claim management careers, particularly after French transport minister Dominique de Bussereau declared the failures as “unacceptable”.