Passengers stranded in Tunnel

After cold halts trains:

BRITAIN: More than 2,000 passengers were forced to spend a panicky night stranded in the Channel Tunnel linking France and Britain after freezing weather caused five trains to break down.

The trains failed on Friday evening as they moved from the freezing temperatures in northeastern France into the warmer air of the tunnel, operator Eurostar said.

On Saturday a couple of Eurostar passenger trains made it through the tunnel, but most services linking London with Paris and Brussels were cancelled Saturday.

The company warned passengers to expect a limited number of trains on Sunday, causing chaos on the pre-Christmas weekend, one of the busiest travel periods of the year.

Some passengers complained they were left to fend for themselves when the trains were halted under the English Channel.

Patrick Dussaut, who was with a group of 40 people from a French company hoping to visit Britain, complained they had been stuck in a Eurostar train since Friday evening and by Saturday lunchtime had still not reached London.

“People have been stuck in the train for 16 and a half hours non-stop, without being able to open the doors,” he told AFP by telephone.

“There have been heated arguments between Eurostar staff and passengers who were fed up of being shut inside the trains. On a human level, the management has been catastrophic.”

Another passenger, Lee Godfrey, who was travelling back to London from Disneyland Paris with his family when the train broke down, criticised Eurostar’s handling of the problem.

“We were without power. We ran out of water, we ran out of food and there was very, very poor communication from the staff.

“We lost air-conditioning when we lost the power. We had to open the emergency doors ourselves,” he told BBC radio, adding that passengers had been “very, very panicky”.

London, Sunday, AFP a