Eurostar – 30 years & counting

At our February meeting Chris McCandless Stone presented Eurostar- 30 years and counting. He looked back over the past 30 years and forward to a more competitive future..

Chris has worked for the company for 24 years starting as an engineering apprentice at North Pole depot and is now Fleet Performance Manager. He is also the guardian of the Regional Eurostar project loco 3303 at York museum.

He took us from the days of the Golden Arrow overnight rail ferry service to Paris (no need to leave your bed) which ended in the 1980s to the opening of the tunnel on 6 May 1994 with Queen Elizabeth and President Mitterrand on the inaugural train. The twin bore 50.4km tunnel is the longest undersea tunnel in the world. The crossing at 160km/h takes 20 minutes and Eurostar was originally a joint project of BR, SNCF and SNCB.  Traffic was an is a mixture of direct passenger, passenger/freight shuttles, and some  direct freight.

Speeds gradually increased to 186km/h (3 miles a minute!) meaning Paris could be reached in 3 hours and Brussels in 3hr 15min.  The classic class 373 Trans Manche super train was based on the TGV cut down to British loading gauge and coping with 4 different power systems..  The network expanded to Disneyland Paris in 1996 and Bourg St Maurice for skiing in 1997. 2002 saw the start of services to Avignon. Once HS1 was open services moved to St Pancras in Nov 2007 and Paris was reached in 2hrs 15 min and Brussels in 1 hr 51min. In 2015 services using e320 sets launched to Amsterdam and in 2020 Rotterdam was added.  A lively discussion took place at the end.

So now we have 4 capitals linked the service merged with Thalys ,  Direct services to Disneyland are planned from the low countries. Possible future extensions to Dortmund Competition from ICE to Frankfurt SNCF and RENFE to Barcelona  and Milan . Evolyn (National Express)  and Virgin  are other possible competitors.  The future looks more than promising for European high speed rail though it looks as though about 3 hours is the limit for business travel and 5 hours for leisure.

The talk was well delivered  by an expert involved in the project from the early days and well illustrated It was well received by and audience of 30 in the room and more on zoom.  A thoroughly good evening.

John Fitzgerald