Passengers booked onEurostartrain services have been urged to cancel or delay their trips after a huge theft of cable in France, which threatened to disrupt the Nato summit in the Netherlands.
Engineers are scrambling to repair the high-speed line after 600m of cable was stolen or cut at LilleEuropestation, the key interchange for trains between London and Paris and between Paris and Brussels and Amsterdam.
On WednesdayEurostar told customersthat, due to the theft, its trains were “likely to be subject to severe delays and last-minute cancellations. Our stations are very busy, and we advise you to cancel or postpone your trip.”
Police have launched an investigation, with forensic teams on the scene outside Lille that has disrupted dozens of high-speed services.
Dutch authorities were also investigating disruption in the Netherlands on Tuesday after a power outage on around 30 rail cables affected trains from Schiphol airport, about 50km away from the Nato summit in The Hague.
The justice minister of the Netherlands, David van Weel, said the damage could have been an attempt to sabotage the two-day meeting of Nato leaders. “The question is who is behind it. It can be an activist group, it can be a country,” he said.
Eurostar advised all passengers on Wednesday to either change their journey or cancel it and request a free exchange or refund. The company said in a statement that it hoped that trains would resume after 3pm.
The French regional train network TER Hauts deFrancesaid 15 cable installers and specialists had been mobilised to repair the line at Lille Europe.
“Delays and cancellations are expected until early afternoon,” the railway company said.
The company said the theft occurred along the track bordering Mont-de-Terre station, between Lille and Lezennes, on signal cables laid in gutters on the ground.
It said agents from the French national rail company, SNCF, were carrying out repairs by bringing in new cables. “As is always the case in this type of operation, the task involves connecting, one by one, around 15 wires making up each cable. This is meticulous work,” it added.
The delays follow disruption on Tuesday after two people died in separate incidents on the line between Lille and Paris, causing the line to be shut for most of the day.
One Tuesday Alex Deane, a consultant who was a passenger on a train to Paris from London St Pancras International scheduled for 3.30pm, said it had been delayed by two hours. After they left London, the train “stopped in the middle of nowhere” and then returned to the British capital, hesaid on social media.
In May, Spain’s transport minister said the country’srail network had suffered “an act of serious sabotage”after vital signalling cable was stolen over a busy bank holiday weekend, bringing severe delays to high-speed services between Madrid and Seville that affected more than 10,000 people.