May 6th - Britain's last embrace of Europe?
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 6 May 2024
⏱️ 7 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Thirty years ago Queen Elizabeth II and French president Francois Mitterand officially opened the Channel Tunnel between Folkestone in Kent and Calais in northern France. So how much has the link transformed travel – and what does the future hold? Unfortunately, it’s been a tale of broken promises so far in terms of direct services between the UK and Continental Europe. The only prospect of improvement: cutting costs and opening up to new budget operators.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to the Independent Daily Travel Podcast with me, Simon Corder. |
| 0:08.6 | It's Monday the 6th of May. |
| 0:11.0 | If you were kind enough to listen to the podcast on Friday the 3rd of May, |
| 0:15.5 | well, you will have heard that I'm on a great trans-European adventure |
| 0:20.2 | following the final course of the Orient |
| 0:24.6 | Express, mostly across Germany. Well, it's been an interesting weekend. Deutsche |
| 0:31.0 | barn, German railways, completely lost the block yesterday. I didn't get to my hotel until |
| 0:36.6 | after midnight, but I'm back on the |
| 0:38.7 | trains again today, hoping to make Paris. But I want to look now at what happened 30 years ago, |
| 0:48.1 | which was the day that the Channel Tunnel was officially opened by Her Majesty the Queen and the French President |
| 0:56.1 | Francois Mitterrand. What great hopes there were. Well, there has been a transformation |
| 1:03.5 | in travel over the past 30 years in Europe, but unfortunately it's had nothing to do with |
| 1:10.7 | the Channel Tunnel. |
| 1:11.6 | It's all about aviation. |
| 1:14.6 | Euro Tunnel, that's the link from Fokston to Calais, |
| 1:19.6 | carries about 20 million people a year in cars and coaches as well as on Eurostar trains |
| 1:26.6 | which run from London to Paris to Brussels and to Amsterdam. |
| 1:31.3 | That is a tiny proportion of the number of people who fly to and from the UK. |
| 1:38.3 | And would you believe the options for train travellers from the UK have just fallen so far short of the original plans. |
| 1:48.7 | You might, possibly, if you live in or are familiar with the Manchester Piccadilly area, |
| 1:56.5 | you might remember that there was a fantastic Eurostar maintenance depot set up there, |
| 2:04.2 | the Manchester International Depot. |
... |
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