Severe weather conditions have forced Eurostar to cancel all services today (Monday) for the third day in succession.
The move follows major disruption on Friday night and Saturday when 2,000 passengers on five trains were stuck in the Channel Tunnel for up to 16 hours and thousands of other travellers had pre-Christmas travel plans disrupted.
The bad weather was also affecting airports across the UK with Manchester airport shut yesterday afternoon leaving hundreds of people stranded overnight and Bristol closed for a period. Flights from other airports were suffering from delays and cancellations this morning.
Eurostar said in its latest service update last night: “As a result of the test runs that were conducted today we now understand the cause of the disruption over the weekend and have identified the modifications that are required.
“As we suspected, the acute weather conditions in northern France have caused the disruption.
“Every year we carry out a ‘winterisation’ programme of the entire fleet which to date has successfully protected our trains. We now know, however, that we need to further enhance the snow screens and snow shields in the power cars of the trains.
“We have already started making the modifications and to ensure that these new protection measures work effectively we are conducting a further series of test runs.
“Our priority is ensuring that when we resume services we provide our customers with a robust and reliable operation.
“We sincerely regret having to take this decision and we understand how frustrated and disappointed travellers will be, particularly those who have been waiting to travel for the last two days.
“We strongly advise passengers whose travel is non-essential to change their booking to a later date or claim a refund on their tickets.
“For customers who have been unable to travel over the last few days, Eurostar will cover the cost of out-of pocket expenses, for example, hotels and taxis. Full details of our compensation policy are on www.eurostar.com”
by Phil Davies
