Eurostar has cancelled all passenger service through the Channel Tunnel until Monday as it investigates why four trains broke down, leaving thousands of passengers stranded overnight.

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. The company also said it would run a series of tests in a bid to find out what happened.

More than 2,000 passengers were trapped beneath the English Channel for up to 16 hours, on journeys from Brussels or Paris to London which shouldn't take more than 2 hours.

Many said they were left without food or water, and complained that staff were unhelpful. Some others also suffered from claustrophobia or panic attacks.

"We were without power. We ran out of water, we ran out of food and there was very, very poor communication from the staff," passenger Lee Godfrey told BBC radio. "We lost air-conditioning when we lost the power. We had to open the emergency doors ourselves."

He added that people on the train had been "very, very panicky".

Passenger backlash

Another passenger, Patrick Dussat, who was traveling from France to Britain, also criticized Eurostar's reaction to the emergency.

"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," he told AFP by telephone.

A rescue locomotive and a shuttle train were brought in to usher passengers out of the 51-km (32-mile) tunnel, the longest undersea tunnel in Europe.

Eurostar has issued an apology and said it would offer refunds, free travel vouchers and more as compensation.

"We're very, very sorry that they've had such a disrupted journey overnight," Richard Brown, Eurostar's chief executive, told BBC TV. "We've been getting people home as quickly as we can but they have had very bad journeys."

Eurostar press officer Paul Gorman said the company hopes to start taking passengers through the tunnel on Monday.


vj/AP/AFP/Reuters
Editor: Andreas Illmer