London St Pancras: The European cities new trains could go to and why it might not happen.Credit: The Independent
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00:00The train should be the natural way to travel from London and perhaps the rest of the UK to continental Europe.
00:09There's a fantastic channel tunnel, a high-speed link from here at St Pancras International going through to the tunnel in Kent
00:18and of course a whole network of high-speed lines once you get to the other side of the channel.
00:25But unfortunately it's never met its potential nor indeed its original targets for the number of passengers.
00:34Eurostar, which currently runs trains from here to Paris, to Brussels, to Amsterdam, to Rotterdam and to Lille
00:43has actually cut back dramatically on the number of destinations served since Brexit
00:49which of course brought huge amounts of complication.
00:53They've even been at times having to cap the number of passengers boarding trains here at St Pancras
00:59because there isn't room to get everybody through passport control.
01:03But now London St Pancras High Speed, which is the trading name of High Speed 1, which owns the station and also the high-speed link
01:14says we want to get more operators in, we want to get more destinations.
01:19That will be fantastic. There's already talk that Evelyn, a Spanish startup, might go in,
01:25that Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Group may get involved.
01:29But there's huge barriers to entry. You have to have special rolling stock and that is extremely expensive.
01:38Also, air links are now so good that one of the destinations mentioned, Milan,
01:44I've counted, is 35 daily departures from London to the three Milan airports.
01:51They take about two hours compared with about 10 hours by train.
01:56I do hope that we will see competition. We desperately need it.
02:00Anything to bring down those fares, which I'm afraid, looking three days ahead,
02:06are three times more expensive on Eurostar than they are on EasyJet.
02:14you