Rail Plus goes ballistic……….
The target was 1hr 51mins, they did it in 1hr 43mins and 53secs and Rail Plus was there for the ride, along with 600 UK and Europe travel agents and travel industry leaders and more than 100 media.
This was the inaugural Brussels to London St Pancras International service of Eurostar on September 20 which shaved about 25 minutes off the existing Brussels-London Waterloo travel time.
Eurostar officially launches the St Pancras station for Brussels and Paris services on November 14, which sees the crowded south London Waterloo phased out of Eurostar timetables.
The Brussels service will take 1hr 50mins and the Paris journey 2hrs 15mins.
The time saving comes from a new 109km track – known as High Speed 1 — between the English Channel and St Pancras International, which is walking distance to Kings Cross and Euston stations and the Underground in northern London.
The St Pancras train reached 300kph over the new track and the trip was widely covered throughout Europe.
London Mail’s Sunday Travel section, for instance, led with the story with headlines “Who needs the plane when you can fly by train…” and “We’ve entered a new golden age of rail travel in Europe”.
The inaugural journey departed Brussels with train-side champagne and smoked salmon and arrived in St Pancras to hard-hats, security barricades and police because the station is still a construction site. The station is being restored for Eurostar’s exclusive use and will open with the world’s longest champagne bar as well as a five-star hotel.
The previous night, Rail Plus was also at a Eurostar dinner in the grand Musee du Cinquantenaire in Brussels.
Chief Executive of Eurostar, Richard Brown said Eurostar was “quite simply the fastest, most convenient way to travel – avoiding wasted time and money in getting to out-of-town airports, lengthy check-in times and baggage reclaim areas”.
He said the new journey times were competitive with flying, using trains that were more productive for business travellers, more relaxing for leisure travellers and greener for all.
The Eurostar new services follow the new fast track TGV Est European trip between Paris and Strasbourg (2 hrs 20 minutes instead of four hours) and preceed a new Barcelona-Madrid fast train service in December which promises to reduce the four hour journey to 2 hrs 30 minutes.
Report by The Mole
John Alwyn-Jones
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