Nineteen people have been injured after a minibus carrying lorry drivers collided with a shuttle train at the French entrance to the Channel Tunnel, in Coquelles, Pas-de-Calais, northern France.
The crash happened on the evening of October 15 at the platform where heavy goods vehicles and their drivers are loaded on to LeShuttle services for the 35-minute crossing to Folkestone, in Kent, southeast England.
Two of the injured were classed as absolute emergencies and taken to nearby hospitals. The other 17 suffered light injuries and were treated in Calais and Boulogne-sur-Mer, according to the Pas-de-Calais prefecture, which described the toll as definitive.
Nobody was killed and none of the injuries was considered life-threatening, the prefecture said. All those hurt were men of various nationalities and the consulates concerned were informed.
The alert was raised at 7.27pm and the emergency response was launched nine minutes later. Some 55 firefighters, 25 medical staff, 20 national police officers and a medical-psychological unit were deployed, alongside about 100 Eurotunnel workers.
The minibus was taking the drivers to the passenger carriage of a freight shuttle that was being loaded at the platform. It left its lane for reasons that have not been established and struck the side of the train, though it did not overturn.
Prosecutors in Boulogne-sur-Mer opened an investigation into unintentional injury.
Agathe Cury, deputy prefect for the Calais district, travelled to the scene and told reporters that no accident of this kind had happened on a loading platform before.
Shuttle traffic through the tunnel was suspended for about an hour and a half while the injured were treated, before returning to normal. Rail freight through the tunnel was not disrupted.
Eurostar services between London and the continent also ran as scheduled. The operator said two late Paris-London departures were cancelled that evening because of engineering work rather than the accident.
Interruptions on the route are watched closely on both sides of the Channel. In December 2025 Eurostar suspended all its trains between London, Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam after a power supply failure in the tunnel brought a LeShuttle train to a halt underground.
The tunnel, opened in 1994, is the only fixed land link between the European Union and the United Kingdom, carrying Eurostar passenger services, vehicle shuttles and rail freight beneath the English Channel.
The route also carries a large share of the goods moving between the two markets. LeShuttle Freight took 94,332 lorries under the Channel in February 2026, 1 per cent fewer than in the same month a year earlier, according to its parent company Getlink.
