A state-level investigation is under way in France after hundreds of Eurostar passengers were stranded overnight before their train crawled into Paris nine hours late on Saturday.
In an embarrassing new record for the flagship service — which normally takes two hours 15 minutes — 640 travellers spent 12 hours and 13 maddening minutes stuck on two trains after switching at Lille.
The second of those turned out to be faulty — having already been refused permission to enter the Channel Tunnel from France — in what passengers said was a decision-making farce.
On Saturday afternoon, a French railways operations official blamed a technical fault on board the Eurostar train, and not the line or the French network and its agents.
But the head of French rail operator SNCF’s France-Europe travel unit, Mireille Faugere, admitted the incident was a “catastrophe for us”, attributing it to “the misfortune of a series of technical breakdowns”.
The passengers had left London on Friday evening and were due in Paris at about 11.30pm local time the same night.
They arrived in the French capital shortly after 9am local time on Saturday.
“It is an absolutely unacceptable situation,” Faugere told reporters at Paris’s Gare du Nord station. “The passengers experienced a real nightmare.”
SNCF chief executive Guillaume Pepy has been ordered to report on Monday morning with “lessons to be learned” to France’s Transport Minister Dominique Bussereau.
According to SNCF statements and the testimony of passengers, the train set off without any difficulties, quickly making its way to the tunnel to France.
At the same time, a security alarm was triggered on another Eurostar travelling in the opposite direction, which meant it would not be allowed to enter the tunnel.
SNCF decided to switch passengers between the two trains at Lille — sending the London carriages back with the Paris departees, and bringing those who left St Pancras into Paris on the train refused entry to the tunnel.
The Paris-to-London travellers arrived at their destination without major delay.
But the London-to-Paris passengers complained of immediate problems, and the train broke down in open countryside near Ablaincourt in the Somme region 120km north of Paris.
The SNCF then sent another train from Paris to tow in the faulty one and its passengers, which didn’t arrive until 4am GMT.
But agents encountered problems coupling the two trains together, and the convoy could not move any faster than 60km/h.
“As soon as we got into it, we sensed there were going to be problems,” said Michele Mathieu. “The train was moving very slowly, the lights were flickering … Then it suddenly broke down, and we were plunged into darkness, without any heating, in exposed countryside.” — AFP