Stowaways Halt Cross-channel Freight Train and Escape Into Kent

Around 40 illegal immigrants were on the run yesterday after tampering with the brakes on a freight train emerging from the Channel tunnel and jumping off the stationary vehicle into the Kent countryside.

Police said that the brake pipes were cut at 6.20pm on Sunday, bringing the 13-wagon Milan to Manchester train to an emergency halt about a mile short of the high security Dollands Moor freight terminal in Kent.

The driver, who remained in his cab, said he saw the 40 or so refugees "leap over live rails" as they ran into the night.

A 12-hour search followed, finding a family of three believed to be from eastern Europe. Foot patrols found another 20 people around Cheriton, a village to the north of Folkstone, but a police spokeswoman said it was not clear if they had been on the freight train or crossed to Britain by other means.

She added that those on board the train knew what they were doing and had planned exactly how to bring it to a stop.

Cutting the brake cables poses no danger to the driver or train since the sudden drop in pressure triggers a failsafe mechanism that simply slows the train down to a halt.

A spokesman for the freight operator, EWS, said: "The driver stayed where he was but everybody that was on it jumped off. They had hidden in the train and on the train.

"If you jump on it in Calais nobody is going to see you so it does not matter where you are, as long as it's somewhere you are not going to fall off."

Andy Lickfold, another EWS spokesman, said he feared for the safety of the illegal immigrants on board when the train made an unscheduled stop.

"Now we have got a safety issue this side because we are concerned for the safety of our crews and the illegals on board.

"When they try to jump off they might get hit by a train, crack their heads on a rail, who knows?

"We are now in a situation where these people are leaping over live rails and someone is going to die very soon," he said.

A spokesman for the British Transport Police, which will investigate the brake cutting but not the illegal immigration, said it would press charges when it had suspects.

The number of illegal immigrants attempting to enter Britain on freight trains, which initially rose after a crackdown on lorries carrying refugees, has fallen since November. Daily services were then cut from 15 to five in an attempt to guarantee security at the SNCF freight depot at Frethun, near Calais, where local police can only patrol for six hours a day.

EWS has criticised security at the yard and pressed the French authorities to put guards on duty 24 hours a day to keep out the asylum seekers gathered in Calais, who are desperate to reach Britain.

Managers from the strategic rail authority recently met SNCF representatives in Paris and promised to pay for enhanced security, including a higher, stronger perimeter fence, better lighting and improved CCTV surveillance. But after long consideration the French refused.

EWS says the Calais-imposed scaling down of its services is affecting business and costing around £500,000 a week.

The three illegal immigrants detained from the train and the others picked up on the foot patrols are now in an immigration centre in Dover where their claims are being processed.

Ploys for entering UK

Police in Lille, northern France, arrested four Romanians in January who were manipulating railway signals on remote stretches of track to halt freight trains. The late night stops were long enough to allow refugees to sneak on board and hope to escape detection before entering the French side of the tunnel.

Five Romanian women, two men and nine children were discovered in compartments under a Eurostar train from Paris at London Waterloo in August last year. Suffering from dehydration, the 16 were discovered when passengers heard a knocking sound from beneath the coaches.

An estimated 500 refugees from the Red Cross centre at Sangatte, near Calais, tried to storm a Eurotunnel terminal on Christmas Day. More than 130 people made it into the tunnel after trampling down security fences and running past guards.

Two Afghan teenagers were plucked from the sea in thick fog by coastguards 14 miles from France in September after trying to cross the channel in a child's inflatable dinghy.