166 Passengers Stranded Just 2 Days After Opening : Train Stalls in Undersea Tunnel in Japan

A sleeper train broke down near the bottom of the Seikan Tunnel early Tuesday, stranding passengers only two days after the world’s longest undersea tunnel was opened to rail traffic.

The 33.4-mile tunnel, which links Japan’s northernmost island of Hokkaido with the main island of Honshu, was inaugurated Sunday morning amid great hoopla. Transportation Minister Shintaro Ishihara hailed the tunnel as “a technological feat without parallel in the world . . . a myth come true.”

But for the 166 passengers on the train, Hokutosei No. 6, bound for Tokyo from Sapporo, the tunnel experience was more of a nightmare.

They were jolted awake at 1:27 a.m. when an electrical circuit breaker in the train’s engine malfunctioned, cutting off power and halting the train just over half a mile from one of the tunnel’s undersea rescue stations, rail company officials said. About three hours elapsed before a new engine was brought in and the train was hauled to safety.

Traveler Has Story to Tell

“We were stuck on the bottom of the sea, and it didn’t feel too good,” Kinji Ikue, a 71-year-old dairy farmer from Hokkaido, told the newspaper Asahi. “But at least we have a traveler’s story to tell.”

A spokesman for Hokkaido Japan Railway said the cause of Tuesday’s breakdown appeared to be a problem with the engine itself and was not related to its passage through the tunnel. He said an emergency generator was used to supply power for the train’s interior lights during the incident.

The Seikan Tunnel project has been marked with controversy almost from the start of construction 17 years ago. The dream of connecting all of the major Japanese islands by tunnel or bridge soured as jet travel made long-distance rail service seem inconvenient. It now takes less than two hours to travel between Tokyo and Sapporo by air, compared to nearly six hours by train through the tunnel.

Similarly, critics have questioned the usefulness of a 7.6-mile series of bridge spans--the Seto Ohashi--that will connect Honshu with the southwestern island of Shikoku next month.

The Seikan Tunnel cost $8.5 billion to build--more than five times the original estimate--and took the lives of 34 construction workers in accidents. Plans to construct special tracks for the Shinkansen bullet train in the tunnel have been shelved because of additional costs. Officials of the recently privatized Japan National Railways Corp. once considered abandoning it in favor of growing mushrooms in the tunnel.

Hokkaido Japan Railway, as Japan National Railways’ successor is known in the region, is resigned to operating the new rail link at a loss for the foreseeable future.

Still, the tunnel is undeniably an engineering marvel. The 29-by-36-foot passage lies 790 feet below the surface of the Tsugaru Strait at its deepest point. Technology developed by Japanese engineers for the project is expected to be used in the Dover Strait tunnel, which is to link France and England.