Eurostar orders 50 trains rated for 131°F as Europe heat accelerates

Eurostar ordered a new fleet of 50 Celestia trains designed to operate in temperatures of up to 55 degrees Celsius (131 degrees Fahrenheit), the company said. The high-speed operator had originally planned for a 45-degree rating. Recent heat waves across Europe drove the change.

"A decision has been taken to equip our new fleet of up to 50 Celestia trains with air conditioning capable of operating in temperatures up to 55 degrees," a Eurostar spokesperson told CNBC by email. "These trains will enter service in 2031 and run into the 2060s so it's essential to be prepared for the future."

The announcement is one of several infrastructure adaptations underway across the continent. Europe is warming at twice the global average since the 1980s, according to the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service. Record heat this summer has strained transport, airports and power grids.

At Oslo Airport, operated by Avinor, asphalt temperatures pushed toward 52 degrees Celsius. Fire crews doused tarmac with roughly 13,000 liters of water per cooling round, repeating every hour during the hottest periods, workers said. The water prevented damage to aircraft stands and taxiways.

Stockholm's public transport operator SL painted railway tracks white to reduce heat-related track displacement and buckling, known as "sun kinks." The method has also been applied on vulnerable sections in Spain and Italy.

Wildfires in France and Spain forced the evacuation of more than 330,000 people in the past week. Both countries are bracing for a fourth heat wave of the summer.

"For decades climate scientists told us this would happen more frequently and that the severity of extreme weather and its consequences would increase. The world did not listen and we keep burning fossil fuels at record levels," Jan Rosenow, professor of energy and climate policy at the University of Oxford, said in a LinkedIn post. "Adaptation alone is not a viable strategy as the extreme fires show us."

James Brennan, director of climate risk modelling at Climate X, said extreme heat days are set to double or even triple across central Europe by 2050 under a high-emission scenario used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Regions currently recording five to 10 extreme heat days per year would see 20 to 30 days per year within a generation.

"Southern Europe faces the most severe conditions, with parts of the Iberian Peninsula, southern Italy and Greece projected to exceed 40 to 55 extreme heat days per year," Brennan told CNBC. "No region in Europe sees a reduction in extreme heat days by 2050: the acceleration is universal. The risk is greatest where exposure is already highest, making adaptation both most urgent and most difficult in the south."

A European Commission spokesperson said the EU will soon present a new framework for climate resilience and risk management. "It is clear that the efficiency and intent of all policies is being compromised by climate change unless that is calibrated into the policy design," the spokesperson told CNBC. "Independent whether we are talking about energy policy, infrastructure, transport policy, health, we have to be able to calibrate our approaches and investments according to the actual climatic conditions in which those policies need to operate."

Lena Fuldauer, head of resilience and business development at Allianz Risk Consulting, called extreme heat "a quiet catastrophe" for businesses, distinct from storms or earthquakes. Heat causes equipment failures, reduced operational efficiency, higher maintenance costs and downtime. Supply chain disruptions, power grid strains and workforce impacts compound the problems.

Fuldauer cited research from Nature Science showing that the June 2026 heat wave saw nearly half of 854 European cities break or approach all-time heat-stress records. The peak hit 48 degrees Celsius at Casteltermini, Italy.

"Temperatures above 50 degrees Celsius, which have been virtually impossible at Mediterranean locations in the pre-industrial world, have seen their likelihood increase by a factor of 10 to 1,000 under human-induced climate change," Fuldauer told CNBC. "By end-of-century, such extremes could occur annually at the hottest locations."

She said the insurance industry needs to become a resilience partner for society through public-private partnerships. "The insurance industry cannot solve this problem alone needs to work with government and international organizations to develop scalable solutions for extreme heat," Fuldauer said.