MatthewHutton
Member
There’s also a lot of people undoubtedly turned off by the Oxford-London-Brussels-Frankfurt/Cologne-Munich/Berlin thing you have to do.
If you could do Oxford-London-Brussels-Berlin/Munich it would all be a lot more tempting.
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Proposed new Channel Tunnel services discussion
- Thread starter TheWierdOne
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If you could do Oxford-London-Brussels-Berlin/Munich it would all be a lot more tempting.
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I'd say Brussels to Berlin/Munich is less likely than London-Frankfurt/Cologne.
Out of interest, how many Flix buses or similar run from Oxford/London to Germany a week? Although the coach will take longer, it is a lot cheaper, so I'd expect that if there's the market to justify the train there'll be enough of a market to justify a coach already.
Sad Sprinter
Established Member
Why?
Same journey time as London - Edinburgh, where rail now has more than half the market, albeit with a (much) more frequent service. 3.6m people flew from London to Amsterdam / Rotterdam last year albeit a decent proportion of the 1.5m who used the Heathrow route would have been changing planes at one end or the other.
My educated guesstimate is that @ 5 or 6 trains per day service, at 2h intervals, could capture about another 1m passengers.
? Why what?
MatthewHutton
Member
There looks to be a daily bus from London to Berlin that is full today and also a daily bus from London to Frankfurt.
Sad Sprinter
Established Member
Why is there so little demand between Paris and Milan/Frankfurt/Stuttgart, they’re important cities.
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Trainbike46
Established Member
You could likely likely also capture parts of the Eindhoven-London Airports market (as Eindhoven is at least partially acting as an overflow for Schiphol), and parts of the Birmingham/East Midlands/other airports not too far away from london-Netherlands market, though not as much as the london-Amsterdam/Rotterdam market.
Overall, I would guess that 2-3 million passengers a year should be possible, or around a quarter of the Netherlands-UK air market. That translates to 5,000 to 8,000 pax per day, which would require around 6-10 services a day if transporting 775 passengers per train from the Netherlands.
Obviously getting there would require building up slowly.
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MatthewHutton
Member
Honestly no one really knows because the current service is poor, and where there is international service that isn’t poor (Eurostar/Thalys) the fares are very high.
It’s the same with long distance in country service. Where the service level isn’t poor (Tokyo-Fukuoka/Kyushu) the fares are very high.
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Sad Sprinter
Established Member
Probably demand pricing? If only Thalys had the same class 374s, perhaps they shouldn’t have been so quick to get rid of the TMSTs.
I wonder if a completely new operation or brand should take over all international high speed rail services in the European Union.
How much demand is there? How much is being catered for by air? (the train journey from Paris to Milan is very long 7h or so, with the flights so much quicker) International journey demand is usually quite different to national capital/main city to provinces demand. Some countries have a greater cultural affinity / historical connections than others.
MatthewHutton
Member
Tokyo-Fukuoka attracts about a 10% market share even given the sky high fares, the extreme ease of access to Fukuoka airport (1 metro stop from Hakata) and short check in times at Japanese airports.
And Paris-Milan could be sped up by an hour if the TGV used the Italian high speed line from Turin to Milan.
Sad Sprinter
Established Member
What? Why doesn’t it?
No ETCS in the current TGVs to Milan. SNCF couldn't be bothered apparently.
MatthewHutton
Member
The Paris-Munich one uses the classic line from Stuttgart to Ulm as well. So it’s slower than a similarly timed ICE service.
HS2isgood
Member
It's actually around 35 minutes that are lost because the French didn't feel like certifying the TGV for Italian high speed lines. That's also why the Frecciarossa is faster, despite actually calling at Lyon Part Dieu. When TGV-M takes over that situation will end, as they'll be certified for Italian HSR (in fact Ouigo Italy will use them).
That is a 5hr run vs a 7hr run. That is Japan, vs. France & Italy. I do not know what the total market between Paris & Milan is, so how many 10% is either (and it won't be 10% because of the journey time differential)
Presumably the FS think there is some extra market there, otherwise they wouldn't have put on competitive service, unless they are hoping to knock SNCF out of course!
MatthewHutton
Member
5 hours in Japan given the ease of airport access frankly at both ends as Tokyo Haneda is also decent is probably equivalent to a 7 hour trip in Europe.
And don’t forget Tokyo-Hakata in Fukuoka is €145 each way with little discounting.
TheWierdOne
Member
Greetings one and all. Quick question, all the talk around depot space so far has centred on Temple Mills, but there’s been little mention of Eurostar’s depot facilities on the continent. Does anyone know how intensively these are used and what their capabilities and capacity are? And to follow on, could the ORR tell Eurostar to move some maintenance work over to Europe (assuming capacity on the continent exists) to free up capacity at this end?
It seems pretty similar to London-Edinburgh in that respect. Train is 4h20-4h40 and there are quite a lot of flights to LCY.
Lots of people still prefer the train to flying. I've got a stronger preference than most of my colleagues and will actively avoid flying, but most of them will still choose the train unless they have serious time constraints because they can work on the train, while the plane is pretty much entirely dead time.
Interestingly the Luxembourg government have been for many years very keen on establishing an express service to Brussels, rather than relying on the existing service which has rather a lot of stops. Unfortunately the railway geography doesn't really support an onward service into Germany, but if it did I'd bet that Lux would put the money up for international facilities there, and a London - Brussels - Luxembourg - Somewhere service would be a distinct possibility.
AlastairFraser
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Well, perhaps a new service could be run initially to Brussels through Luxembourg, non-stop through Metz, onto LGV Est, and then into Strasbourg as a railhead for Germany. You could trial it as a Eurostar Red (Thalys) service from Strasbourg/Lux/Brussels to Lille initially and then the Lille shuffle onto a guaranteed connection into London perhaps.
D6130
Established Member
In my experience - travelling between Paris and Milan and return at least twice a year - both the TGV and Frecciarossa services are very busy in both first and second class.
signed
Established Member
A lot of Milano services are full on departure as they also serve as another Paris-Lyon train
Without the safety of the cross subsidy SNCF or the French political class would be forced to go back to the first principles of running a railway. It may be that they'd be forced to think how to capture markets such as St Etienne - Colmar, Valence - Sarrebourg, or Bourgoin-Jallieu - Calais onto rail. It's not even for lack of trying, SNCF actively makes such journeys as awkward as possible (try changing onto a TGV from a TER at Lyon Part Dieu).
Yet it'd be almost laughably easy to sort this. Credit where credit is due - under regional PSOs the TER services into Lyon and Mulhouse - Strasbourg have become clockface and frequent. All it takes is for Lyon - Strasbourg and Lyon - Lille - Brussels to be clockface two-hourly, which would represent the most marginal resource uplift from the current timetable imaginable. Then just time the Paris - Lille - Calais/Dunkirque splitters at two-hourly intervals to connect into the Lyon - Lille runs. Then all those O-D pairs would be served with consistent journey opportunities with consistent journey times throughout the day and you've created a brand new rail market.
The next step would be to introduce an equivalent LENNON/ORCATS/TSA system as a basis for commercial decisions and subsidy calculations. This way SNCF can't hold regions over a barrel for demanding reimbursements for services they would commercially run anyway.
Do these things and I'd be surprised if they don't soon discover those 2-hourly connections should become hourly ones.
Here we are, back to the absurdity of talking about a railway system in aviation terms. There is a ridiculous number of hurdles -
- The biggest one - being outside of Schengen. The issues are two fold. If Amsterdam - London services could freely pick up and drop off passengers at Antwerp, Brussels and Lille we'd probably be looking at an hourly service already. Secondly we are at the mercy of border control capacity and staffing level consistency at London, Rotterdam and Amsterdam - if that constraint is removed a two-hourly service may be viable
- Channel Tunnel security - I've never got to the bottom of this one. Cars and coaches driving onto Le Shuttle don't go through any security. Is station security an actually mandated thing?
- Eurostar's SNCF DNA
The most fundamental hurdle is not going to go away any time soon. I'm not just interested in railway outputs - I'm interested in socio-economic outcomes. 'Doubling the number of destinations' is an output led soundbite to the point of pointlessness. What's important is an increase in passenger volumes travelling to a more diverse range of destinations including through interchanges - and I think diversifying viable end destinations will be a crucial element in raising the volumes - the point-to-point markets are ultimately finite. With border arrangements limiting direct services to Paris, Brussels, Rotterdam and Amsterdam, growth has to come from interchanges. This comes back to the point of making Lille a Takt node. It's one of the only available instruments.
There's enough circumstantial evidence to say the Paris - Frankfurt/Stuttgart demand is suppressed - high fares, frequency accounts of trains selling out. And I stand by my rule of thumb that if a corridor operates an 'SNCF' frequency (e.g. sort of two-hourly but with gaps) then the actual commercially viable market is at least the equivalent all-day frequency (so clockface two-hourly all day). In the case of Paris - Frankfurt/Stuttgart the main supply-side blockers are actually German infrastructure. I fully expect this side of Germany will be among the earlier adopters of the Deutschlandtakt.
Paris - Milan and Paris - Barcelona probably aren't sufficient competitive to carry any more than the existing 'ardent rail travellers'. I'll wait until all the planned HSLs are built before blabbing on about takt. In Barcelona's case at least wait until Sagrera is complete.
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Austriantrain
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There definetely is security, it is just less intrusive and also less precise, I suppose. The only real Security Risk is a bomb on the train, since a train, unlike a plane, is unlikely to be hijacked. Measures such as on the Shuttle, and sniffer dogs should be enough.
BahrainLad
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There have been numerous terrorist attacks, including in France, where the presence of bombs has been either peripheral to the proceedings or not a factor at all.
Austriantrain
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Of course. A terrorist can use a knife or a gun to attack people on any train, be it E*, a LNER service, a commuter train or the underground.
It‘s not specific to E* and does not warrant security measures that are not used elsewhere. If there is any specific risk, it *is* a bomb in the tunnel. And even that is debatable - the risk is the same in an alpine base tunnel. The only argument might be the specific prominence of the channel tunnel.
Other very real threats, Like attacks on the infrastructure, can not be prevented by checking passengers.
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Cloud Strife
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Strictly speaking, no. The law requires the operators to assume liability for the day-to-day security of the passengers, but there's not a strict "must be scanned" rule in place. That's why Le Shuttle has a very light approach to security, because the risk is minimal. They do observe vehicles, and freight is subject to more in-depth controls, but there isn't a systematic system in place for checking every vehicle. They also use things like thermal sensors and so on, but there's nothing that would class as a systematic security control.
What could and should be done to increase the capacity of security controls is to implement a system of random checks and also background checks. For instance, behind check-in, it would be enough to have individual security stations, where if you've received a green light at check-in, you go straight through without any check, and if you receive a red light, then you go through the security control. This would speed things up immensely, as most passengers would walk straight through.
The real threat to the tunnel comes from trucks, which is why so much money is spent on thermal sensors and so on. The risk from fire is far, far greater than individual passengers, especially as many trucks have been driven for 2-3 hours without stopping before they reach the terminal due to the need to comply with UK law.
Wouldn't London-Brussels-Luxembourg work by itself?