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Eurostar rail services were experiencing a second successive day of severe delays and cancellations on Wednesday after the theft of a cable near Lille forced the diversion of trains to slower routes.
The issues followed significant hold-ups after two people were struck by trains on the same stretch of track on Tuesday. The operator said on its website that some trains between London and Paris could be as much as 90 minutes late, while three services in each direction were cancelled.
The cable theft incident on Wednesday led to long queues at the Eurostar terminal at Paris’s Gare du Nord as passengers held up by the previous day’s problems arrived to find the new set of delays.
The operator was also showing some services between London and Brussels and Amsterdam as suffering severe delays, and was offering passengers the chance to rebook for another day or receive a refund.
Eurostar, controlled by French national train operator SNCF, said: “This morning, services have been . . . affected by an incident of cable theft . . . near Lille. Trains are being rerouted via diversionary routes, which is leading to extended journey times.”
It gave no immediate estimate for how quickly the cable could be replaced and the line returned to normal operations.
Rail infrastructure owners have in recent years suffered frequent problems because of theft of cables by criminals seeking to profit from high prices for scrap copper. Most modern signalling cables, however, are fibre optic and have no scrap value.
