(AFP) – Sep 13, 2008

CALAIS, France (AFP) — Freight services resumed through the Channel Tunnel and Eurostar passenger trains made a slow comeback Saturday, two days after a blaze shut down the busy link between Britain and mainland Europe.

The car shuttle service between Folkestone and Calais would resume partially on Sunday, Jacques Gounon, the boss of operators Eurotunnel, said, with priority for those who already held tickets.

Eurostar said it would run 12 trains each way between Paris and London on Saturday, and six trains each way between London and Brussels. The same number were expected for Sunday, but Gounon said precise timetables for all traffic would be settled by Monday morning at the latest.

The first Eurostar train from Paris for two days arrived in London's St Pancras station Saturday at 8:18 am (0718 GMT), 20 minutes behind schedule, an AFP journalist on board said.

Passengers had noticed a slight smell of smoke in the first few kilometres of the tunnel but it soon disappeared.

They were surprised to find that the train was not full and they were able to pick and choose their seats.

"Passenger traffic will remain disrupted. For the present, the number of passengers is still low but we expect it to pick up a great deal during the course of the day," a Eurostar spokeswoman said.

The first trains to run carried a "few hundred passengers," she said, adding that levels were between 20 and 30 percent, against an average of 80 percent during weekends.

Eurostar is offering to refund the estimated 15,000 people stranded on Thursday after the fire or to swap tickets for a later date.

The passenger traffic was using only the south tunnel which was unaffected by the 1,000 degree Celsius inferno that raged inside the parallel north tunnel.

The world's longest uninterrupted undersea link had reopened to freight shuttle services late Friday, as the exact cause of the blaze remained under investigation.

"Our inspections are now completed," Gounon said on French television earlier. "Installations in the south tunnel, which was not touched by fire, are in excellent condition."

The fire -- the third to strike the 50-kilometre (30-mile) tunnel since it opened in May 1994 -- claimed no fatalities, but left tens of thousands of travellers stranded or forced to change their travel plans.

Extra flights, buses and cross-Channel ferries were laid on. On Friday alone, some 30,000 travellers had been booked to ride a total of 50 Eurostar trains.

But at a press briefing at Eurotunnel headquarters near Calais on Saturday, Gounon said reciprocal travel agreements with ferry operators had worked well.

British and French firefighters on Friday put out the inferno deep inside the north tunnel, after battling all Thursday night in relay teams as the temperature soared to 1,000 degrees Celsius (1,830 degrees Fahrenheit).

Nearly all 27 lorries riding the 700-metre-long France-bound train on which the fire broke out were burned, and Eurotunnel said it would take weeks to rebuild the stricken section of tunnel.

"We need to redo the electricity, the concrete, everything you do when a house burns down," a Eurotunnel spokeswoman said.

The shuttle was about 12 kilometres (seven miles) from the Calais exit on the French side of the tunnel when it caught fire, officials said.

Thirty-two truck drivers aboard smashed windows to escape and get into the service tunnel from where they were evacuated. Six people were injured in the third major blaze since the tunnel under the Channel opened in May 1994, all of them on freight shuttles.

Officials said they suspected the fire started in a truck's braking system that overheated and spread to a tyre, but Gounon said it was too soon to say with any certainty what the cause was.

Service was disrupted for months after the first serious incident in the tunnel on November 18, 1996, when a fire broke out on a late-night freight shuttle injured eight people.

On August 21, 2006, the tunnel was closed for several hours after a truck engine caught fire, sending smoke through the tunnel.

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