October 13th - Competition in the Chunnel: A New Era for Eurostar?
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 13 October 2023
⏱️ 7 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Join me, Simon Calder, from the old Eurostar terminal at London Waterloo. We explore Eurostar's storied past and discuss exciting prospects of fresh competition on the London-Paris route. Will this be the rail revolution we've been waiting for? Tune in to get the latest scoop from the heart of Britain's busiest station.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast, the last one of the week, Friday the 13th of October, with me Simon Calder. |
| 0:13.5 | And yes, I am at a railway station as I so often seem to be. And yes, once again, it's London Waterloo, the busiest in Britain. |
| 0:23.6 | I'm looking specifically out at platforms 20 to 24 in this vast station. |
| 0:32.6 | They're the ones on the north side, and that is, or if you you remember the rich impossible film the west side. |
| 0:41.3 | I don't know why they changed it but it's the one with the great steel and glass curved arch that was used for Euro star for the first 14 years of that cross-channel train company's life. |
| 0:57.0 | The exciting thing is that for the first time in the history of Eurostar, |
| 1:04.0 | so that since 1994, we could finally be getting competition between operators travelling from London to Paris. |
| 1:16.6 | Let me explain why this is important. |
| 1:18.6 | The infrastructure is owned by various people. |
| 1:23.6 | You've got HS1, High Speed One, which owns the bit between London St Pancras International, |
| 1:30.2 | the new hub for Eurostar and the Channel Tunnel. Then you've got the tunnel itself run by a company |
| 1:36.8 | called GetLink. And then you've got the French infrastructure, largely in the hands of the French government. But the lesson from |
| 1:48.5 | right across Europe is when you allow free and fair competition, the rail traveller benefits. |
| 1:57.3 | I mean, let's have a look. We have had a transport revolution since the early 1990s, |
| 2:04.1 | when Eurostar started. The trouble is it's been aviation in terms of international travel that |
| 2:11.3 | has been transformed. And that's entirely because European open skies meant that any airline |
| 2:17.4 | could fly from anywhere in Europe to anywhere else. |
| 2:20.9 | And even despite Brexit, the government appreciates that open skies are the best way to deliver great competition, |
| 2:29.2 | improving standards, lowering fares, expanding choice. |
| 2:33.7 | All of that could be happening on the link from London to Paris, |
| 2:39.8 | which is despite the also being able to travel to Brussels and to Amsterdam on Eurostar, it's London |
| 2:47.2 | Paris, which is the main focus of interest, two biggest cities in Western Europe, |
... |
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