A snow express to Geneva, a wine train to Bordeaux and a business shuttle to Frankfurt could be launched to offer holidaymakers a low-carbon alternative to short-haul flights.
The chief executive of HS1, the operator of the 68-mile railway line between London and the Channel Tunnel, wants to expand Britain’s connections to the continent, and “get more destinations on the departure board”.
Dyan Crowther is working on new routes she hopes will be running by 2026, taking advantage of customers’ desire to save money and carbon emissions.
Eurostar calculates that a passenger’s carbon footprint for a short-haul flight is the same as 13 journeys on its service. It has been almost three decades since the first Eurostar train connected London to Paris, but the list of European destinations has extended to only four others: Amsterdam, Brussels, Lille and Rotterdam. The line, which has a top speed of 185 mph, is being used only at 50 per cent of its capacity.
HS1, previously known as the Channel Tunnel Rail Link, is a consortium of investors who have a 30-year concession with the Department for Transport to operate the high-speed line until 2040. Their aim is to make the line more attractive to train operators, such as Eurostar, the French company SNCF and the Spanish company Renfe, to increase the offering for British passengers hoping to travel to Europe.
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Crowther, who has run HS1 since 2017, said the train to Geneva could be attractive to tourists heading to Europe for the ski season. “[It] is the route that can really, really compete with air,” she said. She estimates that it would take about five hours and claims the company’s research shows the “cut-off for the amount of time that people are prepared to sit on a train is about six hours”.
The aim would be for two or three return services a day to carry about a million passengers a year. While there are Eurostar-run ski trains, which take passengers to resorts in the French Alps, these only run once a week between December and April, and you can only buy tickets as part of a package. Eurostar said that bookings for connecting train journeys between London and the Alps for this ski season were running at three times the level of the last season before the pandemic.
A direct train to Frankfurt and Cologne could attract even higher numbers, Crowther said, while a new route to Bordeaux would make use of an existing high speed line from Paris. Other destinations she hopes will be accessible by about 2030 include Marseille, Toulouse and Milan, once a tunnel through the Alps has been completed between Lyon and Turin.
In March, Eurostar won approval from the European Commission to combine its network with those operated by the French-Belgian high-speed train operator Thalys, for links between France, Belgium the Netherlands and Germany, as part of the Green Speed project. Brussels is mandating the creation of a rail network linking 430 cities with trains travelling at least 100mph by 2040 and is streamlining cross-border ticketing.
In May, the first European sleeper train will run between Brussels and Berlin. The schedule is due to cater to British passengers, with the option to board in London, travel direct to Brussels, and change on to the sleeper to arrive in time for breakfast.
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It is not an easy environment for HS1 to expand in, however. The pandemic cut Eurostar’s revenues by 95 per cent for 15 months and it has responded by shrinking rather than expanding its services. It will stop running a direct train to Disneyland Paris from June 5 and it has halted its service to the south of France until the end of this year and closed its international stations in Kent, at Ebbsfleet and Ashford. Even before the pandemic, only 11 million passengers travelled by Eurostar in a year, half the numbers forecast when the line opened in 1994.
Tougher border controls post-Brexit have increased journey times for passengers to and from Britain, and cut peak capacity at St Pancras International by 30 per cent, from 2,200 an hour to 1,500 an hour, according to Eurostar. The stamping of British passports has added at least 15 seconds to each passenger’s border crossing time.
Crowther warned of even more delays and frustration in May when the European Union is expected to introduce EES, an automated, biometric entry-exit system for travellers from third countries such as the UK crossing in or out of the European Union. It will replace the need to stamp passports. She said the time taken for each British passenger to pass through border checks was likely to increase from 50 seconds to 130 seconds, and that there was not enough space at St Pancras to build sufficient kiosks.
“Our terminal was not built for a post-Brexit world,” she said, adding that she may have to impose a cap on passenger numbers and that it would be “seriously detrimental to passenger throughput and experience”. She is seeking approval from the French government to allow some checks to be done digitally before passengers enter the station.
Crowther said that creating new destinations was a painstaking process. “Any train or new destination has to go through France and the French are very, very protective of Eurostar and are very good at being blockers,” she said.
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“It’s not like airlines where you fly through the air. When you’re looking at new destinations you have to look at the whole system, and it’s a complicated system.”
