November 24th - Eurostar's shock Amsterdam and Rotterdam service announcements
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 24 November 2023
⏱️ 7 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
News has just broken that Eurostar trains from Amsterdam and Rotterdam to London will be canceled from June 2024 to January 2025. The Channel Tunnel passenger rail firm will still run London-Rotterdam-Amsterdam; the problem is space for London-bound frontier formalities while Amsterdam Centraal station is renovated. And Brexit is playing a part ...
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast. It's Friday the 24th of November and I'm |
| 0:07.4 | afraid I'm going to be talking about a topic I wasn't expecting or indeed wanting to discuss. Indeed, |
| 0:15.4 | I had an entirely separate podcast planned, but here's what has just happened in the past 15 or so minutes. |
| 0:24.0 | Dutch Railways has put out a statement saying that Eurostar trains from Amsterdam to London |
| 0:33.2 | will be cancelled completely from June next year to January 2025. |
| 0:42.5 | So, yeah, I'll just restate that so it's clear what is happening for you. |
| 0:49.1 | Anybody who wanted to travel from Amsterdam to or Rotterdam to London, which actually is the fastest growing |
| 0:56.6 | of Eurostar's intercity routes. Well, I'm afraid they will not be able to do so during the second |
| 1:03.9 | half of next year. What's going on? Well, perhaps the most surprising thing is that you will still be able to catch a train from London to Rotterdam and Amsterdam. |
| 1:20.3 | It will just unfortunately have to run empty after that back to Brussels and then pick up some passengers and go to London. |
| 1:30.3 | This possibly strikes you as completely mad. |
| 1:34.7 | Well, yes, it is completely mad in the sense that, well, it's unfortunately one of those things where it's all about frontier formalities and would you believe it |
| 1:49.1 | Brexit yes so the Dutch authorities are renovating Amsterdam Central Station this is a magnificent place |
| 1:58.9 | it is a real work of art actually designed by the same architect in the late 19th century as the Reichs Museum. |
| 2:08.9 | Palace of a place, so good that the Japanese photocopied the plans, or they would have done if photocopies had been around, |
| 2:17.5 | and built their own version of it in downtown Tokyo. |
| 2:23.3 | But it's getting on a bit, aren't we all, and it needs some care and attention, don't we all? |
| 2:30.6 | This is going to mean that space is at a premium. It's already the case that the formalities for |
| 2:38.5 | Eurostar trains going to the UK are already very hungry. That's because since Brexit, every British |
| 2:47.7 | person getting on that train has to have a very scrupulous Dutch frontier official go through their passport and check the stamps in it and to stamp them out. |
| 3:01.0 | It's completely different from when we were in the European Union when all any EU frontier official could do was say, |
| 3:10.5 | is this Simon Calder's passport? Is it valid? Is this Simon Calder in front of me? Seems to be. |
... |
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