(Agence France Presse distributed the following article on September 16.)
LONDON — Eurostar, the company running train services between London, Paris and Brussels through the English Channel tunnel, said it was hoping for a “second birth” after a high-speed rail line in Britain was opened.
Guillaume Pepy, the president of the Eurostar Group, told the French financial newspaper La Tribune that the 74-kilometre (46-mile) stretch of new track — which would cut the time for the London-Paris service by 20 minutes to two hours and twenty minutes — should bring in another 700,000 passengers a year.
“It’s a second birth for Eurostar,” said Pepy, who is also the vice-president of the French national railway SNCF.
The company, jointly run by the SNCF, Belgium’s SNCB and a British consortium, reported mid-July that the first half of this year saw an 11-percent drop in passenger numbers on the Eurostar compared to the first six months of 2002.
The drop — from 3.37 million passengers to 2.99 million — was put down to sluggish economic conditions, with a spokesman denying that the decline had anything to do with the rapid expansion of low-cost airlines in Europe.
Pepy said he expected the time-shaving benefit of the the new track to plug the drop in passenger numbers, although full-year figures for 2003 would still see a decline “of around seven percent”.
The high-speed section of track the company was counting on was to be formally opened later Tuesday at a ceremony at London’s Waterloo station to be attended by British Prime Minister Tony Blair (news – web sites), Transport Minister Alistair Darling and rail chiefs from France and Belgium.
Eurostar spokesman Paul Charles told BBC Radio: “It is a new era, with high-speed lines opening in the UK for the first time… It is a day when passengers will be able to start travelling much faster to the Continent.”
The section — part of the first new rail line in Britain for more than a century — runs from the Channel Tunnel through the county of Kent, southern England, and will be brought into regular service from September 28.
A Eurostar train packed with staff and journalists, but no paying passengers, on July 30 tested the stretch of line, smashing the British rail speed record when it reached 208 miles (334.7 kilometres) per hour.
It was the first time a train exceeded 200 miles per hour in the country, which dominated rail technology in the 19th century but has since lagged well behind the continent since. Trains in France, Germany and Spain have long regularly raced along close to the new British record.
Authorities plan to extend the section of high-speed track to bring a completed Channel Tunnel Rail Link into service in 2007, finally putting an end to the relative crawl passengers encounter in Britain.
However this has come at a price: the initial section, work on which began in October 1998, has cost 1.9 billion pounds (2.7 billion euros, 3.0 billion dollars).
The second part of the line, which will go from north Kent under the river Thames into St Pancras station in central London, will cost an estimated 3.3 billion pounds.
The tunnel runs from the south of England to the north of France. Once completed, the link will slash current journey times to and from Paris to two hours 15 minutes, and to and from Brussels to two hours.