What Went Wrong in The Chunnel?

If that statement seems as bizarre as an oft-told (and true) story of British trains not running “because of leaves on the line” there does, in fact, seem to be some logic to it. Late Sunday French engineers said that Eurostar trains run from Paris to the Channel coast almost entirely out in the open, whereas the run from the London terminal to the Channel is through a lot of tunnels where the air is warmer. The engineers have now decided that in the unusually bitter blizzards that were raging across northern France the Eurostar locomotives ingested snow and then, when they hit the warmer air inside the tunnel, the extreme swing in temperatures blew circuits in the power system.

Even then, these trains have been running in all extremes of weather for years, so the conclusion must be two-fold: That they had never encountered these exact circumstance before -and that the engineers had better have a fix. There are no Eurostar services between the Continent and London today. So far, a staggering 55,000 tickets have been canceled.

Apart from the technical failure, the performance of Eurostar staff on the stalled trains was, from all accounts, abysmal. It’s bad enough finding yourself stuck in one of the world’s longest tunnels but much worse when nobody explains a) what is going on and, b) what you should do. It was cold, toilets broke down, and passengers were left to find their own way to the escape tunnels that run parallel with the train tunnels. Had this been a serious emergency, like a fire, it could have been a catastrophe.

And so a truly transforming piece of European travel infrastructure is looking bad at one of the peak seasons of the year. Coming on the heels of an attempt by flight attendants to paralyze British Airways for the twelve days of Christmas, fortunately thwarted by a court judgment, and the airline chaos caused here at home by the blizzard on the eastern seaboard, it seems that the Grinch is still out there and having a ball.