Passenger Trains Resume Runs Through Channel Tunnel

Two weeks after a fire closed the Channel Tunnel, passenger trains resumed near-normal service between London and Paris on Wednesday, a reopening greeted by champagne and unabated controversy.

Ten journalists were the only passengers when the first Eurostar left London’s Waterloo Station at 5:50 a.m., but traffic built up during the day as the line resumed about 90% of its scheduled service to Paris and Brussels.

“There were no technical problems at all today. Safety is our No. 1 priority. We are only operating because we believe it is safe,” said Ian Brooks, executive commercial director of Eurostar.

Wednesday’s passengers numbered in the hundreds rather than thousands, “but we think there will be a steady increase as the weekend approaches,” Brooks said. Eurostar has a capacity of about 34,000 seats per day, and was carrying about half that many passengers before the Nov. 18 fire, Brooks said.

Permission to resume service came Tuesday night from a British-French safety board, after most travelers had already made alternative plans for Wednesday.

Beefed-up security convinced safety experts--but not all critics--that the 31-mile northern tunnel is safe to use while repairs are underway on the southern tunnel. The fire aboard a trailer truck on a freight train bound for Britain damaged nearly half a mile of the southern tunnel. The two rail tunnels are separated by a smaller, untracked service and safety tunnel.

Eurotunnel, which owns and manages the tunnel, demonstrated to experts Sunday in a full-scale drill that passengers could be safely evacuated while a five-mile section of the southern tunnel is closed during repairs.

Under its new schedule, Eurostar will run 13 trains a day each way to Paris and seven to Brussels, Brooks said in an interview. Travel times will be 20 to 45 minutes longer than before the fire.

U.S. tourists Marvel Crumpacker and Denise Bouwers of Fort Wayne, Ind., were the first regular passengers Wednesday on the first train, boarding at Ashford on the tunnel’s British side. They learned of their distinction when they were presented with a bottle of champagne.

As part of additional security while workers repair the tunnel section, standby trains will be maintained at both entrances to the southern tunnel as emergency evacuation vehicles.

Eddie Ryder, chief of the British delegation to the safety authority, told British reporters that passengers can use the “permanent lifeboat” of the service tunnel in the event of a fire. The November blaze briefly trapped 34 people, eight of whom suffered from smoke inhalation before reaching the service tunnel.

Safety systems did not function as planned during the fire, triggering debate, and the decision to allow passengers back into the tunnel brought new criticism Wednesday. Ken Cameron, general secretary of the union of British firefighters, accused tunnel managers of putting “profit before safety.”

“The tunnel should not have been reopened while repair work is going on. It shouldn’t be a construction site, with welding and so forth, while people are traveling in the tunnel,” Cameron said.

Colin Brown, president of the Consumers’ Assn., called the opening “premature.”

Eurotunnel resumed freight service through the tunnel soon after the fire, and says that next week it will gradually resume service of Le Shuttle, which carries cars and their passengers.