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Eurotunnel Le Shuttle operates passenger and freight trains in the tunnel between England and France.
The crash affected a domestic hourly service from Calais in France to Folkestone in England at 3:50 p.m., carrying hundreds of people and several dogs, PA Media news agency reported.
Passengers are loaded onto a Eurotunnel bus carriage.
Michael Harrison / Twitter / PA Media / PA
Passenger Michael Harrison told PA about his harrowing experience.
“We arrived at the crossing at 3.50pm, the lights went out for approximately 10 minutes and the train stopped. We were told they had to check the problem with the wheels.”
“It took them about an hour and a half to check and they found nothing. They reset things and started another five minute drive,” Harrison added. “It happened again, this time they decided they couldn’t see a problem and we had to wait another two hours and have to leave the train for another train.”
Passengers were forced to walk for about 10 minutes through an emergency connecting tunnel to the service tunnel until another train arrived, Harrison told PA.
Further problems with the replacement train meant passengers finally arrived in England six hours after boarding, he said.
The Eurotunnel Le Shuttle service takes 35 minutes to travel between Folkestone and Calais.
A second passenger told PA: “Many people were freaking out about being down in the service tunnel, it’s a bit of a strange place. We were stuck down there for at least five hours.”
Fellow passenger Kate Scott said the temperature in the tunnel was a problem.
“It was hot, there was no air condom, they gave water but we didn’t really know what was going on,” she said.
“The service tunnel was terrible,” Sarah Fellows, 37, told PA.
“It was like a disaster movie, you were going into the deep without knowing what was going on. We all had to stay in this big line under the sea,” she said.
“There was a woman crying in the tunnel, another woman walking alone in shock,” Fellows added. “They were really old people waiting for them to walk a mile in the middle of an undersea tunnel.”
“At one point I was having a panic attack and Border Force told us the tunnel had been evacuated one other time in the last 17 years, not recently,” she said.
The issue also had a knock-on effect on later services.
CNN has contacted Eurotunnel for further comment on the incident.
When the Channel Tunnel opened in May 1994, it revolutionized travel between the UK and mainland Europe.
It had been rumored for more than 180 years before British and French workers broke ground and began digging for each other in 1988.
It took 13,000 workers six years to build the 31.4-mile tunnel, which runs 23.5 miles under the sea, making it the longest of its kind in the world.
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