The Eurostar is a service linking London to Paris and London to Brussels. On the continent all the high speed railway lines are in place for the eurostar to take advantage of its top speed of 300km/h (186mph). The French lines were build in 1993. In South East England, the area called Kent, there are no high speed lines. The Channel Tunnel rail link will be a high speed line, and the first major new railway in the UK for over one hundred years. Sheduled for completion by 2003
It currently takes 3 hours to go London to Paris, and 2hours 40minutes London to Brussels. Although this is considerably less than the 6-9hour Journey by car or bus, airlines at 45minutes can still compete well. It would not be unrealistic to bring London to Paris down to 2 hours 20minutes, and London to Brussels down to 2hours. If this occured it is expected Eurostar would virtually wipe out air services between the cities. A good thing for Eurostar (lots of Profits) and for heavily conjested airports. Clearly airlines will loose out.
The track from London to Folkestone (where the channel tunnel begins) is fairly normal. Here the Eurostar may reach a top speed of 100mph (160km/h) which is only just over half of its top speed. Between London and the Channel Tunnel it averages a speed of about 60mph (100km/h). By comparison in France between Lille and Paris the Eurostar averages a speed of about 160mph (260km/h). Admittedly this just happens to be the fastest section of line in europe! The Eurostar has to share the line with local trains which can stop at stations at up to every 2 minutes in London.
There are several problems with upgrading existing track. True enough between Tonbridge and Ashford the track is very straight. However it relies on a 3rd rail electric system at 750V, which will not provide nearly enough power for high speed running. A proper 25kV overhead wire system could be introduced, however at great cost since all bridges and tunnels along the route would have to be raised. Then the line would have to be resignalled. Then the problem of organising fast Eurostar trains around local 100mph (160km/h) trains occurs, and with rail demand set to grow into the 21st century, the line could face serious capacity problems. An option is to add third and fouth tracks to the line which will be for the eurostar only, but this would be effectively building a new line.
Adding third and fouth tracks to existing line was one of about 100 route options considered. However instead of widening the rail transport corridor it was decided that it would be better to widen the road transport corridor, the motorway M20 as was done in France. Once near London the line will go underground for a run across London under the River Thames and into a new terminal to be build at St Pancras, with other terminals in London. St Pancras is a small station with only 9 tracks in a Victorian building. New platforms will be built with care to retain the nineteenth century architecture.
The cost of the project is roughly £3billion (US $5billion). The british government has promised to spend £1.5billion on the project, the rest of the money raised by London and Continental railways who operate Eurostar. However Eurostar has not been making anything like the profit projected. Experts had predicted in 1996 the Eurostar would carry 10million passengers, however it only carried 6 million. Growth will ensure some profit but not all that much. Ironically poor journey times are to blame, and the huge fees paid to Eurotunnel for use of the channel tunnel (about 40% of ticket prices). Railtrack (rail infrastructure maintainers and builders in the UK) have suggested an option for half the price, which would mean not building any of the expensive tunnels through London to St Pancras and sticking with the Waterloo terminal. The great thing about this is that if money can be raised in the future the option to go to the originally planned St Pancras station then it can be built. It seems a sensible option to remain with the Waterloo terminus which did cost £400million. A high speed link will definatly be built but the question of how much of it and when is still uncertain.
The linespeeds will be at 270km/h or 168mph. The route will be 108km (68miles) long and the journey time will be 33 minutes, an average speed of about 125mph (200km/h). 24% of the line will be in tunnels. Curves will have a radius of more than 1500m (nearly a mile).
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