Exactly. Eurostar is only of use for London and South-East England. For the rest of the UK, it is an irrelevance, so most people in the UK wouldn't care if it went to the wall. Post-Brexit and post-Covid, travel between the UK and Europe is only likely to recover slowly and partially, so Eurostar's future prospects are not good.
False equivalence and what-aboutery. TPE provides key interurban services in the North of England and Scotland. Eurostar provides non-essential rail services to foreign countries and is almost entirely owned by foreigners. Without French government funding it may be at risk, as it is majority-owned by a French state company (SNCF), but it is not the responsibility of the UK government.
Not sure why you mention language. Danish and Italian is not that different to English to Italian, except more english is spoken in Italy than Danish.
Ryanair and easyJet happened, which effectively killed both off.
As someone who has had to make several essential journeys between Belgium and the UK (allowed by the rules of both countries each and every time and no more often that was strictly necessary), I heartily second this as I also consider that it is an essential service that has made such travel far easier, greener, less time consuming, and with less exposure to other people (thinking of huge queues at Heathrow of multiple plane-loads of passengers vs just those I shared a train with) than if I had flown.
In the unlikely event that paths can be found, I wonder if EMR could operate some "feeder" services similar to the Welsh ones to Waterloo. If someone was travelling from Manchester to Brussels, I wonder if they'd rather spend 20-30 minutes extra on a direct train to St Pancras via Derby rather than a 15 minute out of station change from Euston.
Only true among railway enthusiasts, staff on discount tickets, and those who do not fly, either for environmental reasons, or because they've a fear of flying. The reality is Eurostar don't try to integrate with other rail services at either end very hard, and they most certainly don't offer sensible prices.
Maybe, but who do you propose pays the bills meantime?
I wouldn't say there is no integration with Dutch and Belgian services. Eurostar offers fares to any station in both countries and the trains call at the main stations where you can change to nearly any region. There is even an unofficial cross platform interchange in Rotterdam to the north of the Netherlands! Also the fares I've used to the Netherlands were really sensible: €35 for a single London to any station in NL in August.
Which you estimate exclusively because you're one of them. Not a group who can provide justification for potentially hundreds of millions of pounds of public money being lost.
Those fares are only on general sale for people in the UK from London to Belgian stations. You cannot book them without changing to the Dutch site for Dutch stations and aren't available at all to stations in France or Germany. Eurostar withdrew their facility to book from UK stations which they used to offer by telephone or online. Nobody knows specifically why. So I'd stand by the assertion that they haven't made very much effort. Lots of cut-price tickets have been made available on Amsterdam trains while they're ramping up but those fares aren't available to Brussels on the same train, nor at comparable rates to France. Genuinely through tickets to German stations were previously available but no longer.
I completely agree. The current passenger rights provision make it impossible that journeys like Manchester to Koln by international rail will become mainstream.
There's no objective analysis that suggests Eurostar is competing with budget airlines for journeys from the North of England, so it will collect the trivial business I've identified. Compared with the proportion of the market based in London and the Home Counties this is insignificant.
OK then it's not irrelevant. It's nearly irrelevant. Does that somehow change something?
Everything is relevant to everything else at least a little bit. Where would you draw the line? 1% of custom? 0.1%? 0.0001%? One person? All technically "relevant". I'm willing to bet there's one person who lives on Skye who usues Eurostar regularly. Are they relevant?
Only for one connection though. If you've missed a subsequent connection this isn't necessarily protected. It's also not clear you're able to demand accommodation be provided, so you may need to wait overnight in a station or on the street for the next train, or pay for your own accommodation.
You would be covered if your journey were using one ticket. So Edinburgh to Dresden would have been covered with two tickets, one from Edinburgh to London and one London to Dresden. Today you'd need a third ticket.
I thought the justification for this was that hardly anybody used them. I’m sure I saw some figure - and I might be talking rubbish here - that the number from Leeds was only in double figures in a year. Yet two colleagues and I used the service from Doncaster to Brussels four times a year, and I’m sure we can’t have been the only ones. Yes, I suppose you can buy London CIV tickets, but how many people know about them?
Yep that was right, I think that Eurostar expected that moving to St Pancras would boost through traffic from the North but the reality was that it hardly made any difference to the number of through tickets sold and it was certainly not enough to justify the sales operation. I think its such a niche market that removal of the through ticket arrangement didn't reduce the sales very much people just bought tickets from London instead.
