Eurostar passengers described 8 hours of “hell” after their train to Amsterdam was stranded in a blistering heatwave, as France recorded its hottest day and a fierce political debate over air conditioning erupted.
The train left Paris’s Gare du Nord on Wednesday but stopped near Fresnoy-le-Luat just after 7.30pm due to a technical problem caused by “exceptional heatwave conditions”, the company said. With no electricity or air conditioning, passengers waited on board or beside the tracks as temperatures nudged 40C. Police, firefighters and civil protection crews arrived to help the elderly and hand out water.
“Eurostar passengers endured eight hours without AC in France's record heatwave, as the country's political divide over air conditioning deepens.”
“Eurostar, our train from Paris to Brussels is stopped on the tracks, what the hell is going on?” one passenger wrote on X. A rail replacement finally arrived at 12.30am, allowing travellers to reach the Belgian capital hours after the scheduled 7.47pm arrival. Other passengers continued to Amsterdam by bus or taxi.
Amar Chaabi, Eurostar’s chief operating officer, said: “We fully understand what our passengers experienced last night and offer them our sincerest apologies. The safety of our customers guided every decision taken throughout this incident.” He added that the company would analyse the incident “in detail to learn all the lessons”.
The stranding came after Tuesday was confirmed as France’s hottest day on record, intensifying a long-running national argument over air conditioning. Only 25% of French homes have an air-con unit, compared with 50% in Spain and Italy and 90% in the US and Japan. Thousands of schools have closed, and hospitals – rarely equipped – have seen staff complain of intolerable conditions.
This week Marine Le Pen of the populist right demanded a mass subsidised roll-out of air conditioning, while traditionally hostile Greens conceded that some may now be unavoidable. Marie Tondelier, head of the Ecologists party, broke what she called “anti-clim dogma” by saying air-conditioning would be needed in schools and hospitals. “There are places where we just can’t do without it now,” she said.
For years the Green movement has regarded la clim as the worst solution to climate change, arguing it aggravates global warming through electricity demand, refrigerant gas leaks, and an urban heating effect that can raise city temperatures by two or three degrees. New building norms in France still aim to make air-conditioning unnecessary through insulation, greenery and hi-tech air-circulation. But with heat records tumbling and passengers left stranded in the dark, that consensus is being tested.