Disruption on HS1 due to signalling problems caused by flooding in the Thames Tunnel.

[Trainguy34]

Speculative Discussion Alert!

They could try and turn things at Ebbsfleet but no onward connections, apart from a (Likely) 1 hour last minute replacement bus to Stratford, however ULEZ would cause a problem supplying many high capacity frequent buses. They could try and, from there, try and bus people the 5 mins to Northfleet and let them make their way from there, however this would probably cause severe overcrowding unless they could source extra trains and, most unlikely, drivers to run a non-stop service to either London Bridge, Cannon St, Charing Cross or Blackfriars with available paths.

 

[Benjwri]

Not going to pretend that it is easy but you have to admit that eurostar falls way short of what you would reasonably expect of conventional railways or planes.

Eurostar has basically zero resiliency. It isn't good enough if more than half of paris London journeys depend on them.

We hear loads of excuses but much of this could be sorted through better planning and advance preparation.

There are other trains down to the coast. They could use different operators or surge somehow with different stock. They could negotiate in advance to do border checks at lille or Paris? Or have a way to reopen Ashford at short notice. Or run buses through le shuttle or ferries.

None of this should be hard. There are loads of possibilities but none are viable because there is no prep. So everytime we just get told that it isn't possible. It represents massive ignorance and greed to just not bother with contingency planning. Especially when fares are approaching or exceeding 500 quid return on trains with many hundreds of seats.

I'm of course not suggesting eurostar doesn't try to get some passengers to cancel or postpone to reduce load. But to do nothing is just inexcusable.

I think this fails to acknowledge the difficulty that would be faced in such contingency. Border checks on arrival are an absolute no go, that is entirely out of their control, and would require negotiation between the French and British Government. Reopening Ashford at short notice is only useful in very limited circumstances, the only one I can remember being today, all others have been issues with the tunnel itself, and delayed le shuttle too. Maintaining Ashford services would mean making sure drivers, guards and platform staff were trained to operate there, which isn't possible unless they start stopping there again.

The idea of having buses and ferries is just ridiculous. Short of Eurostar maintaining their own fleet of buses and ferries, which just sit around, with drivers and crew on standby 24/7, paid 99% of the time to do nothing, they will never be able to source replacement coaches and spaces for them on le shuttle/a ferry for thousands of passengers an hour.

 

[jayah]

Not going to pretend that it is easy but you have to admit that eurostar falls way short of what you would reasonably expect of conventional railways or planes.

Eurostar has basically zero resiliency. It isn't good enough if more than half of paris London journeys depend on them.

We hear loads of excuses but much of this could be sorted through better planning and advance preparation.

There are other trains down to the coast. They could use different operators or surge somehow with different stock. They could negotiate in advance to do border checks at lille or Paris? Or have a way to reopen Ashford at short notice. Or run buses through le shuttle or ferries.

None of this should be hard. There are loads of possibilities but none are viable because there is no prep. So everytime we just get told that it isn't possible. It represents massive ignorance and greed to just not bother with contingency planning. Especially when fares are approaching or exceeding 500 quid return on trains with many hundreds of seats.

I'm of course not suggesting eurostar doesn't try to get some passengers to cancel or postpone to reduce load. But to do nothing is just inexcusable.

Getting people to cancel is cynical - they are likely to travel using another carrier at their own expense and all of the costs of them not performing are then avoided.

Judging by their 2022 reports, using EBITA / Turnover Eurostar runs a 21% profit margin. Yet when something like this happens they aren't liable for the sort of airline compensation that would apply for the same London to Paris journey. All the costs of these situations are being dumped on others travellers via the insurance system.

 

[Dave W]

Interesting that things seem to have gone downhill - when I passed the scene last night the water seemed to be a lot less than shown in the video up thread, and whilst the train clearly wasn't at linespeed there didn't feel to be an extreme cause for concern and there was no one on sight.

Does anyone know what caused the situation to deteriorate overnight? Or is it simply a case of closing to safely repair?

 

[Failed Unit]

I think this fails to acknowledge the difficulty that would be faced in such contingency. Border checks on arrival are an absolute no go, that is entirely out of their control, and would require negotiation between the French and British Government. Reopening Ashford at short notice is only useful in very limited circumstances, the only one I can remember being today, all others have been issues with the tunnel itself, and delayed le shuttle too. Maintaining Ashford services would mean making sure drivers, guards and platform staff were trained to operate there, which isn't possible unless they start stopping there again.

The idea of having buses and ferries is just ridiculous. Short of Eurostar maintaining their own fleet of buses and ferries, which just sit around, with drivers and crew on standby 24/7, paid 99% of the time to do nothing, they will never be able to source replacement coaches and spaces for them on le shuttle/a ferry for thousands of passengers an hour.

In the days when Ashford was open, I remember they didn’t terminate services at Ashford when it went pear shaped (not many I should add). At least SouthEastern trains could get people back to London, but it did fill up a lot of trains as a result.

But even if Ebbsfleet / Ashford were open and useable. The trains are the wrong side of the river. Yes you have the trains coming from Europe but it will still be a very messy situation.

 

[yorksrob]

Thank goodness for the South Eastern main line to Charing Cross !

 

[21C101]

This is a good example of how there is just no resiliency built in.

A resilient operation would terminate international trains at Ashford and run the hourly Javelin services from Dover and Margate fast to Cannon Street (would say Victoria or Waterloo international but engineering works) via the Gravesend West Branch or Tonbridge depending on the obstruction giving a half hourly service to London

The infrastructure is there, the Javelins are the same TOC, by cancelling the Margate - London via Gravesend Javelins you free up drivers and stock and with recent service cuts eg Victoria stoppers via Herne Hill cut to half hourly instead of every 15 minutes, there is capacity.

Funny to think that BR routinely ran boat trains at short notice via variable routes that way as recently as the 1980s.

 

[brad465]

This is a good example of how there is just no resiliency built in.

A resilient operation would terminate international trains at Ashford and run the hourly Javelin services from Dover and Margate fast to Cannon Street (would say Victoria or Waterloo international but engineering works) via the Gravesend West Branch or Tonbridge depending on the obstruction giving a half hourly service to London

And enthusiasts would be dropping what they were doing, booking last minute hotels and train travel where necessary and flocking to Kent to grab that opportunity!

More seriously it was only 8-10 years ago that a daily/weekly ECS movement occurred over the Fawkham jct link, in the form of a 395 running Ashford-Swanley and back. I don't know how much service resilience that provided but it would be a lot better than now.

 

[Trainguy34]

And enthusiasts would be dropping what they were doing, booking last minute hotels and train travel where necessary and flocking to Kent to grab that opportunity!

Or for those of us nearby, finishing work before "seeing our dad" who works in Ashford (Might just be me there) before getting home at near midnight.

 

[grinderx]

I think this fails to acknowledge the difficulty that would be faced in such contingency. Border checks on arrival are an absolute no go, that is entirely out of their control, and would require negotiation between the French and British Government. Reopening Ashford at short notice is only useful in very limited circumstances, the only one I can remember being today, all others have been issues with the tunnel itself, and delayed le shuttle too. Maintaining Ashford services would mean making sure drivers, guards and platform staff were trained to operate there, which isn't possible unless they start stopping there again.

The idea of having buses and ferries is just ridiculous. Short of Eurostar maintaining their own fleet of buses and ferries, which just sit around, with drivers and crew on standby 24/7, paid 99% of the time to do nothing, they will never be able to source replacement coaches and spaces for them on le shuttle/a ferry for thousands of passengers an hour.

I know it's hard. What I'm saying is that there's obviously a middle ground here and eurostar hasn't bothered to do much at all.

I was at St Pancras when it all went pear shaped last week. There were perhaps two eurostar staff and they were just telling people they couldn't do anything.

We didn't know what to do. Nobody did. There were hundreds of people trying to make alternative arrangements. It took until after Christmas to get a refund. What do you do if you don't have the money fast enough? Sleep under london bridge until after Christmas? Key point: would an airline abandon you? Do uk train companies?

Nobody is suggesting a backup ferry service, an extra fleet of trains, or moving absolutely everybody using one mode of transport etc. What is needed though is some advance negotiation to create better options.

What was learnt a decade ago during the snow was that eurostar had apparently never detrained in the tunnel before. Passengers had setup makeshift toilets after being left in car wagons. There were people carrying luggage in the service tunnels because there wasnt an understood plan for non urgent evacuation. Eurostar staff ran for cover. They didn't really know what to do. Nothing has changed.

The governments should sit down and negotiate. The border checks situation is laughable. Eurostar should be lobbying for that to change.

There needs to be a way to divide up the line so that the bits that are unaffected can still be useful. If that means that eurostar need to pay for that then so be it. They charge enough.

Would it have been too hard to setup an faq page on the website or to help passengers decide what to do?

I can't speak on behalf of the 15000 people impacted today or last week, but there is a lot of anger building up. Is it realistic to just offer eventual refunds? Should it be allowed?

 

[Snow1964]

Probably fairly long, but also all the equipment will have been mothballed, and probably be out of date. Was Ebbsfleet open for post Brexit? If not it might not have the equipment or setup for post Brexit checks.

Regardless there is nothing stopping Eurostar operating a limited service in the UK direction only to at least get some people back

The full post Brexit passport checks have been deferred, and are not yet implemented. About the only part that has changed so far is an ink stamp. Anybody could carry a rubber stamp and ink pad in their pocket.

Customs have blue, red, green lanes, if anything one is now closed, rather than anything new.

There is also the possibility some of the staff who nowadays work at St Pancras, formerly worked at either Ebbsfleet or Ashford, so know the sites anyway. If they haven't got trains at StP, no point in them sitting around there all day, when they could be better deployed.

Eurostar is not some low cost, run on a shoestring operation, instead at the prices they charge, they ought to have active contingency plans.

 

[QueensCurve]

In a sense this shows a worrying lack of resilience for a new tunnel designed, without wanting to presume the cause of the flooding, well into the climate change era.

I would have expected the design of the tunnel to have been subject to a robust hazard identification process such as HAZOP. Water pipes intot the tunnel should have been equiped with safeguards such as multiple isolation valves. The drainage system should have had redundancy and diversity to enable adequate extraction capacity to be maintained. There should have been bidirectional signalling (isn't that standard on high speed lines?) to enable a service to be maintained through a single tunnel and there should have been adequate segregation to ensure that the two tunnels do not suffer common cause flooding.

I also think it would have been sensible to have kept the option of going to waterloo or to go to St Pancras by an alternative route.

A further observation is that National Rail Enquiries make no mention of Eurostar. Why does the service exclude Eurostar? Even given that they do, surely it is impropper for a disruption report to feign no Knowledge of Eurostar when they are clearly affected and the main concern in national news coverage?

 

[ThameslinkUser]

A further observation is that National Rail Enquiries make no mention of Eurostar. Why does the service exclude Eurostar?

Because it is National Rail Enquiries and not International Rail Enquiries.

 

[Samzino]

Makes it even worse that there is an acclaimed international station at Stratford that was never fit for the purpose. Had it been actually built properly/ used as intended, it would have been a key help in a situation like this.

 

[fandroid]

Because it is National Rail Enquiries and not International Rail Enquiries.

That is top-level pedantry and no excuse whatsoever. Trains leaving and arriving at St Pancras should be included.

 

[Taunton]

Discussion about the source of the problem, seemingly a water main burst and possibly on the surface which has run down the tunnel gradient, is on the other thread.

However it does appear that Eurostar to London has been progressively marginalised by its management, ever since it was sold off from having any UK share of ownership. The recent merger with Thalys, maintaining the better Eurostar brand name across all, seemed immediately to bring consolidated reporting where one cannot now see the figures for punctuality or profitability in isolation. It seems now to be regarded as a nuisance branch line.

 

[D6130]

Makes it even worse that there is an acclaimed international station at Stratford that was never fit for the purpose. Had it been actually built properly/ used as intended, it would have been a key help in a situation like this.

Why would it have been a key help in a situation like this? It's the wrong side of the affected tunnel!

 

[LNW-GW Joint]

Because it is National Rail Enquiries and not International Rail Enquiries.

Eurostar is not part of the regulated UK railway.
It operates under British/French government agreements which includes operation through the Channel Tunnel.
Network Rail maintains HS1 under contract to the the owners, but it is not part of the normal Network Rail management structure.

 

[AndrewE]

Discussion about the source of the problem, seemingly a water main burst and possibly on the surface which has run down the tunnel gradient, is on the other thread.

This closed one? https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/eurostar-st-pancras-tunnel-flooded.260251/ I can't see that there, and it wouldn't seem to tally with the video of water gushing out of or around a big pipe in the tunnel wall...

Eurostar is not part of the regulated UK railway.
It operates under British/French government agreements which includes operation through the Channel Tunnel.
Network Rail maintains HS1 under contract to the the owners, but it is not part of the normal Network Rail management structure.

Maybe, but it is still part of our rail/public transport infrastructure...

 

[fandroid]

Anyway. NRE is showing it.
Screenshot below showing a "Eurostar suspended" on NRE

 

[ThameslinkUser]

Maybe, but it is still part of our rail/public transport infrastructure...

As is the Glasgow Subway, the London Underground, the Croydon Tramlink, Edinburgh Trams etc etc. Like these, Eurostar is not part of the National Rail network.

 

[AndrewE]

As is the Glasgow Subway, the London Underground, the Croydon Tramlink, Edinburgh Trams etc etc. Like these, Eurostar is not part of the National Rail network.

Yes, but if something is a really important distributor of passengers arriving by rail it seems like a dog-in-a-manger attitude not to warn them. So I wouldn't bother reporting on Glasgow subway, maybe even Croydon Tramlink or Edinburgh trams but the core LU definitely.

 

[Peter Mugridge]

is the thames tunnel bi-directionally signalled like the channel tunnel?
could use wennington crossover to allow single track working for a reduced service of eurostar?

also more crayon than realistic but could they still drag 373s with 73's via NLL to Fawkham Junction?

For the first point, I am told both tunnels are flooded so even if they could run bi-directionally, that's a non-starter now.

For the second point, I thought Fawkham had been severed at one end? It's certainly out of use. I'm not sure there's any realistic way round to access St Pancras either?

The main thing is, I think, once this is sorted to look at the resilience of the Thames Tunnels - with a view to avoiding having both out of action at the same time. For example are there cross passage doors fitted and if not why not? Is it the same pipe leaking into both tunnels - if so, can it be relocated to avoid the risk in future?

 

[Gloster]

Eurostar is a train service. Many people know that the way to get information about disruption to train services is to look at the National Rail website. So, if the news reports that Eurostar is disrupted, they will try National Rail and…run up against another example of the balkanisation of the railways.

 

[Class 170101]

I'm still baffled why Bi-Directional working isn't being used.

Are both tunnels affected?

 

[Oxfordblues]

According to the 1pm news bulletin on Radio 4 Eurostar trains have been cancelled due to "flooding in one of the tunnels" leading ordinary punters to surmise that the Channel Tunnel itself is flooded. (Many listeners were also led to believe that the PM had cancelled HS2.)

 

[AndrewE]

Eurostar is a train service. Many people know that the way to get information about disruption to train services is to look at the National Rail website. So, if the news reports that Eurostar is disrupted, they will try National Rail and…run up against another example of the balkanisation of the railways.

Yes, it is really (deliberately?) unhelpful for NRE to go on at length about the domestic services but keep completely stumm about E*

I'm still baffled why Bi-Directional working isn't being used.

Are both tunnels affected?

Yes, that's what post #53 says...

 

[Djgr]

Our country has really become broken over the past decades.

 

[Horizon22]

And enthusiasts would be dropping what they were doing, booking last minute hotels and train travel where necessary and flocking to Kent to grab that opportunity!

More seriously it was only 8-10 years ago that a daily/weekly ECS movement occurred over the Fawkham jct link, in the form of a 395 running Ashford-Swanley and back. I don't know how much service resilience that provided but it would be a lot better than now.

The track doesn’t even exist at Fawkham Junction any more, so that’s a no-go.

I think some are severely underestimating just how difficult it would be to implement an international rail contingency service (with passport control post Brexit) and even if it could be done, the speed at which it could be implemented. I agree that Ebbsfleet should be able to be utilised as some sort of backup even if it’s just a skeleton service - my earlier point about shifting passengers onward still applies though.

 

[Failed Unit]

We didn't know what to do. Nobody did. There were hundreds of people trying to make alternative arrangements. It took until after Christmas to get a refund. What do you do if you don't have the money fast enough? Sleep under london bridge until after Christmas? Key point: would an airline abandon you? Do uk train companies?

N

Absolutely - Airlines are well known to treat their customers like total @£$%. Look for excuses why they shouldn’t pay compensation, slow paying when they do agree etc. In that respect delay repay is better as they don’t start saying we owe you nothing because the wind was blowing from the east the airlines do. Whether that is Ryanair or BA, when the chips are down you are on your own. Many examples of this, like every time the computer systems goes down at Heathrow.

Some of the things on the thread are interesting, like why can’t the other tunnel be used? (no suitable crossovers?)

The 374s I assume are not actually cleared for anywhere of HS1?

The track doesn’t even exist at Fawkham Junction any more, so that’s a no-go.

I think some are severely underestimating just how difficult it would be to implement an international rail contingency service (with passport control post Brexit) and even if it could be done, the speed at which it could be implemented. I agree that Ebbsfleet should be able to be utilised as some sort of backup even if it’s just a skeleton service - my earlier point about shifting passengers onward still applies though.

That to be honest is why if it was possible Ashford would probably be better, at least it has more existing services, but as we have seen in the past, they would very quickly become overwhelmed (so would that be a good thing).Considering how the TOCs are struggling to run the timetable, I can’t see how SouthEastern would be able to add extra London - Ashford services on the classic lines.

I agree terminating at Ebbsfleet alone would be a bad idea, That station isn’t the most accessible anyway unless you are driving.