Extra locomotives should be kept at the ends of the Channel Tunnel to help prevent a repeat of a major Eurostar breakdown in December, a damning study into the debacle will urge, reports said Thursday. Eurostar should also bolster winter shielding inside its trains, and improve communications inside the tunnel between Britain and France, where more than 2,000 passengers were left stranded for hours overnight just before Christmas. The official report into the embarrassing breakdown, in which several trains became stuck in the tunnel due to freezing temperatures, is to be published Friday. The continental train service was massively disrupted when five trains broke down in the Channel Tunnel on December 19 after snow which fell in northern France melted and caused the trains' electrical systems to malfunction. The Financial Times said the study, by former train company boss Christopher Garnett and French civil engineer Claude Gressier, found that a rescue locomotive successfully rescued the first train to break down. But the multiple near-simultaneous failures made it impossible for further rescues by locomotives. Efforts to use later Eurostar trains to push the first stricken trains out of the tunnel ended with those trains also becoming stuck.
