A bomb alert at Calais-Fréthun railway station in northern France has disrupted Eurostar services between London and Paris, with French authorities halting all trains through the stop.
The Pas-de-Calais prefecture announced the alert on social media platform X on the morning of November 12. It said checks were under way to rule out any danger and warned the operation could affect traffic around the station.
Eurostar said in a statement that, at the request of the French authorities, “trains are currently unable to pass through Calais-Fréthun station”. The operator added that this was causing delays to some services to and from London.
TER Hauts-de-France, the regional arm of French State rail operator SNCF, said traffic on the line between Calais and Boulogne-sur-Mer had been suspended in both directions. It linked the stoppage to a report of abandoned luggage at the station and said at 9.45am local time that it expected trains to run again at around 10.30am.
Eurostar did not say when normal cross-Channel service would resume. Neither the operator nor the prefecture gave any figure for the number of passengers affected.
Calais-Fréthun lies on the outskirts of Calais, close to the French entrance of the Channel Tunnel. It is the last station on the French side before the tunnel, meaning any stoppage there quickly hits rail traffic between the UK and the European Union.
Eurostar trains no longer stop at the station. Services there were suspended during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and never restored, prompting the mayors of Calais and Boulogne-sur-Mer to campaign publicly in 2025 for their return.
The alert is the latest in a series of disruptions on the cross-Channel route. In March 2025, the discovery of an unexploded Second World War bomb near the tracks north of Paris Gare du Nord forced Eurostar to cancel all trains between London and Paris for a day.
On December 30, 2025, a power supply problem in the Channel Tunnel halted Eurostar and LeShuttle traffic in both directions, leaving travellers stranded at both ends of the line. On October 15 this year, an accident on the Eurotunnel loading platform near Calais injured 19 people, five of them critically, according to local emergency services.
The disruption comes as Eurostar’s grip on the route faces a challenge. On August 17, the UK’s Office of Rail and Road (ORR) said it had cleared Virgin Trains to run up to 20 daily return services through the tunnel from 2030.
Such a service would end the monopoly on passenger trains through the tunnel that Eurostar has held since it opened in 1994. Trenitalia France has also said it would launch a Paris-London service from 2029.
