July 11th - The ghost Eurostar station at Ashford International
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 11 July 2022
⏱️ 7 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In today's podcast, I am in Ashford, Kent, to visit the ghost terminal that used to connect Eurostar trains between mainland Europe and the UK before the Covid-19 pandemic severely diminished passenger numbers.
The building is a fascinating sight, let's hope this travel stop gets reconnected soon.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast. I chuckle because I'm coming to you from the top floor of a very, very large car park. |
| 0:12.9 | And the reason I'm here is because the car park is looking across at an excellent piece of infrastructure designed to hugely increase connectivity |
| 0:25.2 | in this corner of southeast Kent. I'm in beautiful Ashford looking across at the North Downs. |
| 0:36.0 | It's a spectacular view from up here, but what captures the eye is the very impressive and expensive infrastructure directly ahead. |
| 0:46.3 | And I'm going to walk through the overpass over an easy dual carriageway and take you in there. |
| 0:55.5 | Here we are. |
| 0:56.7 | High speed one. |
| 0:58.6 | That is the name of the line that runs from here across to London St. |
| 1:06.3 | Packras International. |
| 1:09.1 | And that is really useful in terms of southeastern trains which get to the capital |
| 1:13.8 | in about 15 seconds flat. I exaggerate, but not by much. Along the way, they stop at Ebb's feet |
| 1:21.3 | station in northwest Kent, south of the Thames and a bit of a sort of car park in the middle of nowhere but crucially |
| 1:32.1 | these stations are designed to be connected with france and with belgium and in time maybe even with the |
| 1:41.1 | Netherlands but for the past two years and a bit they have not been. |
| 1:48.0 | At the start of the COVID pandemic, |
| 1:51.0 | when Eurostar's passenger numbers collapsed and remained so for basically two full years, |
| 2:00.0 | about the first thing that happened was that stops were taken out of the time-taker. for basically two full years, |
| 2:00.9 | about the first thing that happened was that stops |
| 2:03.0 | were taken out of the timetable. |
| 2:05.6 | And that includes the excellent station here |
| 2:09.2 | at Ashford International, as well as Ebsfleet |
| 2:12.3 | and indeed across the other side of the channel, |
... |
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