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Panic among passengers as train evacuated under English Channel

Passengers stranded in the tunnel under the English Channel. Picture: Kate Scott/Twitter

Passengers stranded in the tunnel under the English Channel. Picture: Kate Scott/Twitter

Hundreds of rail passengers have been evacuated after their train broke down underneath the English Channel.

They were transferred to a cargo train but complained of being stuck in the sub-sea tunnel for nearly five hours.

The initial breakdown late on Tuesday affected the 3.50pm Eurotunnel Le Shuttle service from the French port of Calais to Folkestone in England. This led to hundreds of passengers being ushered into a service tunnel.

Videos on social media showed holidaymakers walking through the alternate tunnel alongside the 50-kilometre rail route between Britain and France, some with suitcases and dogs.

Travellers in Calais were told to stay away from the terminal until 6am on Wednesday, with pictures showing gridlock at the shuttle terminal late into Tuesday night.

“We got on the 3.50pm crossing. Approximately 10 minutes in the lights went out and the train stopped,” one of those on the evacuated train, Michael Harrison, from Cranbrook in Kent, told the PA news agency.

“We were told they needed to investigate an issue with the wheels. It took approximately one-and-a-half hours for them to investigate and … not find anything,” Mr Harrison said.

“They reset things and set off for another five minutes. It happened again … we waited a further couple of hours to decide they couldn’t see a problem but had to evacuate the train to another train.

“After further waiting we left the train through the emergency link tunnel to the service tunnel. We then walked approximately 10 minutes to a train in front of the stricken train.

“That train then stopped as it couldn’t get traction, presumably as it was long and had no weight on it. We finally arrived in Folkestone six hours after boarding.”

Another passenger who was evacuated, but did not want to be named, told PA, “several people were freaking out about being down in the service tunnel, it’s a bit of a weird place”.

“We were stuck down there for at least five hours,” the passenger said.

Sarah Fellows, 37, from Birmingham, took 18 hours to return home from a family holiday in France after the distress of the evacuation.

“The service tunnel was terrifying. It was like a disaster movie,” she said.

“You were just walking into the abyss not knowing what was happening. We all had to stay under the sea in this big queue.

“There was a woman crying in the tunnel, another woman having a panic attack who was travelling alone.

“I was panicking at one point and Border Force told us the tunnel had been evacuated one other time in the last 17 years, not recently.”

-AAP

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