Eurotunnel passengers had to be evacuated from a train on Tuesday evening after it was brought to a halt beneath the English Channel.
They were transferred to a cargo train, but complained of being stuck in the sub-sea tunnel for nearly five hours, citing issues with the replacement transport.
The incident began when the alarms went off on the 3.50pm Eurotunnel Le Shuttle service from Calais to Folkestone, which needed to be investigated.
"The Shuttle was brought to a controlled stop and inspected. As a precautionary measure, for their safety and comfort, we transferred the passengers on board to another shuttle, via the service tunnel (which is there for exactly that purpose)," a spokesman said.
"We brought them to the passenger terminal building, where food and drinks were available, and then slowly brought out the original shuttle and reunited them with their vehicles."
@itn @Channel4News @LeShuttle @y_leriche any interest in some footage of today’s Channel Tunnel evacuation? pic.twitter.com/kZKdSYcAzp
— James Hamilton (@underemployed) August 23, 2022
Videos on social media showed holidaymakers walking through the alternate tunnel alongside the 31-mile rail route between Britain and France, some with suitcases and dogs.
Meanwhile, travellers in Calais were told to stay away from the terminal until 6am on Wednesday, with pictures showing gridlock at the shuttle terminal late into Tuesday evening.
Michael Harrison, from Kent, one of those evacuated from the train, said: "We got on the 3.50pm crossing, approximately 10 minutes in the lights went out and the train stopped."
He said that they were told the engineers "needed to investigate an issue with the wheels", which "took approximately one and a half hours for them to investigate and obviously not find anything".
'There were gasps of incredulity'
He said they "reset things" and set off for another five minutes, but then the issue happened again.
"We waited a further couple of hours to decide they couldn't see a problem but had to evacuate the train to another train," he said. "After further waiting we left the train through the emergency link tunnel to the service tunnel.
"We then walked approximately 10 minutes to a train in front of the stricken train.
"This was a bus carriage where we got transported to Folkestone. That train then stopped as it couldn't get traction, presumably as it was long and had no weight on it. There were gasps of incredulity when that was announced.
"We finally arrived in Folkestone six hours after boarding."
Another passenger who was evacuated said that "several people were freaking out about being down in the service tunnel, it's a bit of a weird place".
They added: "We were stuck down there for at least five hours.
"If I've got a gripe it's that they knew several-hundred people were arriving at Folkestone who hadn't eaten for five, six or more hours and there was absolutely nothing for us here.
"Just huge queues for Burger King."
Meanwhile, Sarah Fellows, 37, from Birmingham, described the incident as "utter carnage".
"The service tunnel was terrifying. It was like a disaster movie," she said. "You were just walking into the abyss not knowing what was happening. We all had to stay under the sea in this big queue.
"Fire and rescue were there. There was a woman crying in the tunnel, another woman having a panic attack who was travelling alone.
"They were expecting really older people to walk for a mile down the middle of a tunnel under the sea.
"It was utter carnage when we arrived in Folkestone as they hadn't really prepared for us arriving. It just wasn't organised of how to evacuate that train.
"I was panicking at one point and Border Force told us the tunnel had been evacuated one other time in the last 17 years, not recently."
