Furious French Demand To Know Why Part-French Company's French Trains Are Rubbish

With the French government angrily asking why Eurostar is complete shit (clue: it's part-owned by SNCF, and French power-station constructor Alstom designed and built its rolling stock), the deeply-embarrassed company announced it would be resuming services on Tuesday, by which time everybody's travel plans will have been comprehensively ruined.

As the useless company launched a probe to find out why it took so long to evacuate six immobilised trains (clue: it's part-owned by SNCF, and French power-station constructor Alstom designed and built its rolling stock), chief executive Richard Brown said he was "very, very sorry" that he was being made to look like a complete dick on national TV in Britain, France and Belgium. He insisted, however, that the problem was entirely due to fanatical suicide snow, and certainly nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that Eurostar was part-owned by SNCF, or that its rolling stock was designed and built by French power-station constructor Alstom.

"The average pig-ignorant traveller might be tempted to think that a company which builds power stations might have grasped the basic notion that water and electricity don't mix," he told reporters today. "However, the problem seems to have been that snow somehow got inside the power units, possibly by deliberately targeting the huge ventilation gratings. When the trains passed from freezing cold air into the dank, humid environment of the tunnel, the evil snow cynically melted and got into the electrics, causing the train's fuse to blow.

"When our office staff got to work on Monday morning, somebody noticed that rather a lot of trains had apparently failed to arrive at their destinations," explained Mr Brown. "We immediately activated our emergency procedure, which was to send a temp down the tunnel on foot with a wind-up torch. When he found the broken-down trains, he returned promptly, collected some 13-amp fuses from our depot outside Paddington and strolled back down the tunnel to fix things. What's all the fuss about? The system works."

Eurostar (part-owned by SNCF) says it is working as fast as it can to fix the elementary schoolboy error in the basic design of its rolling stock (by French power-station constructor Alstom), by stuffing hundreds of bath-towels around the electric motors and installing vast banks of hairdryers - electric hairdryers - outside both ends of the Channel Tunnel.

Meanwhile, smug railway experts - who point out that Britain happened to make rather good trains, once upon a time - are waiting patiently for the French to shit themselves and gesticulate wildly once they remember that Alstom also built many of their nuclear power stations.