Tens of thousands of passengers who were expecting to travel on Eurostar trains between London, Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam yesterday woke up on New Year’s Eve where they did not expect to be.
Due to technical problems in the Channel Tunnel, 30 international trains were cancelled on Tuesday – and one which did run arrived this morning in Paris a full 12 hours behind schedule. Eurostar has not commented on the journey, but Eurotunnel said it was not responsible for what it called an “overnight incident on the British network”.
Wednesday’s trains are almost completely full and running late, with significant delays reported on either side of the Channel. The Independent calculates that about 25,000 passengers were affected by the cancellations.
Problems had begun in the early hours of Tuesday morning with a power failure in one of the tunnel bores between Folkestone and Calais. There is a well-rehearsed response to this, single-line working: a sequence of services, comprising LeShuttle car-carrying trains, freight trains and Eurostar passenger services, travels in one direction. When they are all through, trains travel in the opposite direction. It slows everything up, but people and goods get through eventually.
But then a LeShuttle train broke down and everything seized up. Initially Eurostar dispatched trains towards the Channel Tunnel hoping the blockage would be removed. But by late morning, the train company was sending them back to where they started, and urged passengers not to try to travel. Trains resumed around 4pm, but by that time many people had given up.
Readers have asked whether the Channel Tunnel is particularly susceptible to disruption. In fact, Eurostar and Eurotunnel rarely go wrong, at least compared with the aviation industry. Most of the time they shuttle people efficiently between the UK and the continent. But when things do go wrong, they tend to go very wrong indeed for Eurostar, because it has such a huge slice of the market between London and Paris – the two biggest cities in western Europe.
There is simply no easy way to get those tens of thousands of people to their destination. Even though easyJet put on extra capacity yesterday between London and Paris, air fares have soared due to the mass cancellations. The cheapest British Airways flight on Wednesday is £625.
Eurostar says it will cover “reasonable expenses, including hotel accommodation up to £150/€170 per room, per night” for passengers who were stranded by the cancellations, adding that the contact centre “will be pragmatic when compensating”. Taxi costs up to £50/€60 per journey are also covered, as well as food and drink expenses up to £35/€40 per person, per day.
There is no possibility of an airline-style payout of hundreds of pounds for long delays and cancellations.
Rail services elsewhere in the UK are also disrupted over the new year. No trains will run to or from London Liverpool Street station until 2 January, while the West Coast Main Line between Preston and Carlisle will close from New Year’s Eve to 15 January.
Read more: Eurostar chaos: What are your rights if trains are cancelled or delayed?
