Anyone who has planned a weekend escape to Paris by rail knows that Eurostar can be prohibitively expensive, when booked at shortish notice and when compared to low-cost flights. The cheapest one-way Eurostar ticket from London to Paris on 21 January, at the time of writing, was £97, while the cheapest one-way plane ticket was £27.
But change might be afoot: enter Richard Branson and Virgin Group with plans to muscle in on Eurostar’s monopoly operating long-distance high-speed trains through the Channel Tunnel.
A £500m investment in a fleet of a dozen trains, discussions with four different potential manufacturers, and a 2029 start date, are all being talked about. And Branson is not alone – Evolyn, a Spanish-led consortium, is among the other players wishing to enter the market.
A recent announcement from the UK’s Office of Rail and Road that the amount paid by operators to use the High Speed 1 (HS1) line between London and the Channel Tunnel should be cut by 10.4 per cent between April 2025 and April 2030 will lower operational costs both for Eurostar and its potential rivals.
The prize for Virgin and travellers alike – on paper, anyway – looks substantial. Good-quality high speed infrastructure with spare track capacity on both sides of the tunnel that a new operator could use. It could open up direct travel from the UK to cities on the Continent that are underserved by high-speed rail, and it would help attract passengers away from airlines.
But before we can get too excited about Branson’s plans, there are many hurdles to overcome. You cannot just order trains off the shelf – a train compatible with the Channel Tunnel’s fire regulations would have to be at least a partially bespoke design. Beyond that, the main manufacturers of high-speed trains already have full order books supplying trains for other parts of Europe – Branson would be at the end of the queue, meaning 2029 looks optimistic.
Then come the headaches with passport controls and bag scans. Eurostar must offer adequate capacity at each station for passport checks (French authorities are responsible for passport checks at St Pancras and British authorities are responsible for checks for passengers to the UK from the Continent), while Eurostar works with an agency (Mite) that carries out security services, such as bag scans.
So, Virgin would face a choice: rival Eurostar on its core routes – where stations with passport and security facilities exist – or expand to serve new stations (but then face the cost of having to build security facilities and ensure security staff are based in these places)
The idea of running direct trains from Cologne, Geneva, Lyon and Bordeaux to London has long been discussed, but all of these stops would need to be adapted before cross-channel traffic could start. While a direct train to the vineyards of southern France or to the mountains of Switzerland sounds appealing, those are trips passengers are likely to make less often than a short hop across the Channel.
In the UK, too, Virgin would face a quandary. Eurostar judged stops in Ebbsfleet and Ashford in Kent to not be profitable enough to serve after the company took a financial hit during the Covid pandemic – any rival to Eurostar could see this differently and cater to Kent passengers.
Even more radical would be to finally open Stratford International for the purpose for which it was named, namely for trains to other countries (Stratford is on High Speed 1, the UK’s only high-speed railway connecting London to the Channel Tunnel). Doing so could also reduce the pressure on the terminal at St Pancras where the slower border controls post-Brexit have limited the capacity to 1,500 passengers per hour (down from 2,200 pre-Brexit) of the station, and the terminal can be chronically busy at peak times.
In both the UK and the rest of Europe, low-cost, no-frills rail operators have begun to pop up, copying some of their ideas from budget airlines. Lumo in the UK, Ouigo in France and Flixtrain in Germany offer a model a rival to Eurostar could follow: pack them in and price it cheap. That model would work well for the short trips to Brussels or Paris. But with no public subsidy of any sort available to a Channel Tunnel operator, any Eurostar rival is going to have to make a profit – and swiftly. That is no easy task.
So, Virgin’s ambition should be commended, but do not uncork that bottle of Bordeaux just yet.
Jon Worth is an independent railway policy analyst based in Bourgogne, France. His research and advocacy work focuses on improving cross-border passenger railways in Europe.
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