Plans for direct trains from London St Pancras to Germany and Switzerland: Simon Calder explains all

London St Pancras: The European cities new trains could go to and why it might not happen.Credit: The Independent

Transcript

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