Londres (CNN) — Passengers traveling from France to England were evacuated from a Channel Tunnel train under the English Channel on Tuesday and left stranded for hours.
“A train broke down in the tunnel and we are in the process of transferring customers to a separate passenger train through the service tunnel, back to our Folkestone terminal,” tweeted Channel Tunnel late Tuesday UK time. “We sincerely apologize for this inconvenience.”
Eurotunnel Le Shuttle runs trains carrying passenger and freight vehicles through a tunnel between England and France.
The breakdown affected the 3:50 p.m. (local time) service that ran from Calais, France to Folkestone, England and was carrying hundreds of people, as well as several dogs, the PA Media news agency reported.
Overcrowded passengers in a Eurotunnel car. Credit: Michael Harrison/Twitter/PA Media/PA
Passenger Michael Harrison recounted the puzzling experience to PA.
“We went up to the 3.50 p.m. crossing, about 10 minutes later the lights went out and the train stopped. They told us they had to investigate a problem with the wheels,” he said.
“It took them about an hour and a half to investigate and obviously they didn’t find anything. They did a reboot and we moved forward for another five minutes,” Harrison added. “It happened again and then we waited another couple of hours to decide that they didn’t see any problem, but they had to evacuate the train to another one.”
Passengers were then evacuated through the emergency link tunnel to the service tunnel, walking for about 10 minutes to another train, Harrison told PA.
Other problems with the replacement train meant that passengers finally arrived in the UK six hours after boarding, it added.
The Eurotunnel Le Shuttle service normally takes 35 minutes to travel between Folkestone and Calais.
A second passenger told PA that “several people freaked out being down in the service tunnel, it’s a bit of a weird place. We were stuck down there for at least five hours.”
Another passenger, Kate Scott, said temperatures in the tunnel were a problem.
“It was hot, there was no air conditioning, they gave us water but we didn’t really know what was going on,” he said.
Sarah Fellows, 37, told PA that “the service tunnel was terrifying.”
“It was like a disaster movie. You went into the abyss without knowing what was going on. We all had to stay under the sea in this big queue,” he said.
“There was a woman crying in the tunnel, another woman having a panic attack who was traveling alone,” Fellows added.
“They expected really old people to walk a mile through a tunnel under the sea.”
“At one point I panicked and the Border Force told us that the tunnel had been evacuated once again in the last 17 years, not recently,” he said.
The problem also had repercussions on downstream services.
“Due to the breakdown of the previous train, we advise you not to travel to the terminal tonight,” Eurotunnel said in a Tweet late Tuesday. “Please come tomorrow after 6 in the morning.”
On Wednesday morning, the company said the trains were running again. “After yesterday’s incident, we are back to normal services,” tweeted.
CNN has contacted Eurotunnel for further comment on the incident.
The Channel Tunnel revolutionized travel between the UK and mainland Europe when it opened in May 1994, making the journey much faster than the equivalent ferry route.
It had been more than 180 years in the making before British and French workers laid the foundation stone and began digging toward each other in 1988.
It took 13,000 workers six years to build the 50.5-kilometre tunnel, 39 of them underwater, making it the longest of its kind in the world.