It’s been three decades since Eurostar was a serious competitor

In theory, the news that a new investor is planning to launch a rival to Eurostar should be a big boost to British travellers who prefer trains to planes.

The proposal comes from a startup called Evolyn and its backers are led by the Spanish Cosmen family, which already holds investments in the coach and rail company Mobico (formerly National Express). It plans to acquire 12 high-speed trains “to increase the connection options between the UK and several countries in continental Europe.”

A shake-up is certainly overdue. I’m old enough to have travelled on the first trial Eurostar services – then from Waterloo – a few weeks before the official launch in 1994. Despite the teething troubles and the fact that the British leg of the high-speed line was still more than a decade away, it was an incredibly exciting moment. Especially for someone who was used to travelling to Paris on the overnight boat train via Dover or Dieppe.

There have been a few bright spots since – the opening of St Pancras International (in 2007), the route down to Avignon (2002) and, eventually, to Rotterdam and Amsterdam (2018-2020). But the dream of a seamless inter-connection between the UK and the wider high-speed network in Europe has never come close to being realised. Hopes for direct connections with the north of England never got off the ground and various plans announced by the company to expand the network to cities like Frankfurt, Cologne, Geneva, and Bordeaux have never happened either. Services to Calais, Lyon and Marseilles were started then dropped. And, since Covid, things have gone backwards. The network has shrunk as the operator has focused on the three core destinations of Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam in order to rebuild profits after the pandemic. And it’s worked for them – last year, the group’s turnover was up 2.5 times compared with 2021 and its gross profits soared to a record €332 million (£288 million).

But is it working for the passengers? Not if you look at the network. Eurostar is no longer serving Avignon, Disneyland Paris, the Tarentaise valley, Ebbsfleet or Ashford. The situation with costs is harder to work out. Eurostar says that on standard fares for travel in the summer of 2023, across all routes, one in three tickets was sold for less than €60 (that is about £103 return). It said that the median fare for booking London-Paris one month in advance was €82, which is about PS142 return. But, as we went to press, it couldn’t give me overall average fares or data on how they compared with previous years.

Certainly if you plan well in advance, pick quieter days and times and use the Eurostar low-fare finder on its website, you can still get returns to Paris for less than PS100. But my purely subjective sense – having been booking tickets for nearly 30 years – is that things are looking significantly more expensive than they were pre-pandemic. For example, booking a London Paris return for travel at the end of last month four months ahead still cost me £138, even though I booked four months in advance and picked my departure times carefully. Have a look for yourself (eurostar.com) and see what you think about current prices.  So what difference would a rival make? Certainly it would focus Eurostar’s mind on keeping its fares competitive.

Thirty years is far, far too long to operate without competition. And if Evolyn really is thinking of offering connections to “several countries”, that could be good news too. (Though, of course “several” could easily mean no more than the current clutch of Holland, Belgium and France). And there is plenty of room for expansion – according to the Channel Tunnel operator, only about half of the capacity for passenger trains is being used at the moment.

But what about the capacity at the stations? My frustration with Eurostar – and I have travelled to and from Paris several times this year, as well as Amsterdam and Rotterdam twice – is not the quality of the trains, nor the reliability of the service. Those have been fine in my experience. The frustration I always struggle with is the experience of catching the train in the first place.

True; security and immigration queues seem to have got better at both London and Paris over recent months, but even St Pancras, which has the biggest waiting area, struggles to cope with numbers once you are through and waiting to board the train. (Having the boarding ramps right in the middle of the waiting area only makes things worse.) Last time I went through Brussels – a year ago – the facilities were spartan at best, in fact there they seem to have got worse over the years. And unless you are savvy enough to make your way to the far end of the departure lounge at the Gare du Nord, they are far too cramped there too.

In short, the trains may be high speed but the process of getting on them operates at a snail’s pace. The Eurostar website recommends arriving 90 minutes early in London, and 90-120 minutes in Paris and Brussels. Take them at their word and you could be spending as long at the station as on the train. And things may get more cramped because of the space needed for the introduction of the new terminals for the EU’s computerised entry and exit system (EES) – which will probably be introduced sometime next year.

This need for space to process passengers through security and then keep them in holding pens before they board the train is also a key obstacle in opening up the high speed network from London more generally. Any new destination to be served direct needs the space to provide the facilities, including a dedicated platform, and must be prepared to make the investment for the long term.

There are things which can be done to make things more feasible – such as immigration controls happening on trains or on arrival, rather than on departure. And more commercial competition would definitely be a bonus. But we also need more strategic ambition and more long-term investment from the operators and end destinations if the potential for high speed international rail travel from the UK is going to be fulfilled.