Comment: Competition hots up on the Channel Tunnel route

Paths are available for trains to and from the continent, but maintenance facilities and stabling berths are in shorter supply, notes Philip Haigh.

For international services, London’s High Speed 1 route to the Channel Tunnel remains woefully underused.

Monopoly operator Eurostar typically sends 15 services to Paris and nine to Brussels on a weekday. Little wonder then that Gemini Trains is the latest company to eye up the route (RAIL 1032). It joins Heuro, Evolyn and Virgin in suggesting that the route has potential.

They reckon that delivering competition to the line will grow the market and make fares more competitive. This comes as Eurostar is increasingly seen as the expensive option for travel to continental Europe.

It’s certainly true that fares can be expensive, but there are cheaper options. Booking to Paris one week out for April 9 showed six services at £235 in Standard Class, and four at £218. Five trains were not available. In Premier, the fare was never less than £345 with four trains (0801, 0931, 1031, 1131) not available.

Look further ahead, fares become cheaper. May 6, for example, had three evening trains with promotional fares of £35 in Standard Class (1801, 1901 and 2001), while other fares in this class ranged from £74 to £149. Premium fares were £325 or £345.

Yet other operators have tried and failed to run international services. Deutsche Bahn was optimistic way back in 2010, when it even brought an ICE train into London St Pancras.

DB’s chairman then was Rüdiger Grube, who said: “We plan to launch a new and highly attractive product between the United Kingdom, Benelux and Germany. This new product will offer better comfort than a plane, faster connections from city centre to city centre - and also be far more environmentally friendly.”

DB wanted to start running in 2013, but couldn’t get approval for the Velaro trains it wanted to run. It became bogged down in a process controlled by the Intergovernmental Commission (IGC), which includes the Channel Tunnel Safety Authority. The IGC is staffed by British and French officials, with the French side reporting to a government that also partially owned Eurostar, with which DB would be competing.

As Lord Tony Berkeley (incidentally now chairman of Gemini Trains) put it to Westminster’s Transport Committee in March 2013: “The end result of this process for the DB passenger trains was that they almost got approval. The paper was signed. The French member of the IGC delegation returned to Paris and was promptly sacked for approving a German train.”

In written evidence to the committee, Eurotunnel said: “To the risk of stating the obvious, no new services by new entrants can ever be launched without trains… As at February 22 2013, no prospective new entrant has ever received such authorisation from the IGC.”

Over a decade later, that statement remains true. And since then, Britain has left the European Union, which likely makes the process of running international trains harder rather than easier.

Train manufacturer Siemens still lists the Velaro type that DB wanted to use in its current portfolio. It’s the type that Eurostar operates as Class 374, so perhaps this time it will be easier to win permission to use the type if it’s the one prospective operators want?

But trains will not be the only obstacle. The route between the Channel Tunnel and London might have plenty of space, but that’s not the case at St Pancras station, where queues and crowding form part of the passenger experience for too many.

HS1 Limited holds the concession to operate the line, and it is responsible for St Pancras and the other international stations along the route. It’s recently rebranded itself to the rather clumsy ‘London St Pancras Highspeed’, with Chief Executive Robert Sinclair claiming the change is “not simply a change of brand or a new logo”. But that’s what it looks like, so forgive me if I stick with its formal name - HS1.

HS1 has known about St Pancras overcrowding for some time, and it has recognised that changes to border controls have made this worse following Britain’s departure from the European Union.

It’s now looking for a contractor to design changes for St Pancras that will improve capacity in two phases. The first will make the most of the current layout from an operational viewpoint. The second will design and deliver a reconfigured ground floor to meet passenger forecasts out to 2035, if not 2040.

HS1 acknowledges that Eurostar’s ambitions see passenger numbers growing from 19 million today to 30 million in 2030. That’s around a 50% increase, which suggests Paris departures increasing to 23 per day (almost a half-hourly service for much of the day) and Brussels numbers lifting to 14.

That would see three international trains leaving and three arriving in most hours - which, with a Class 374 seating 894 passengers, means just over 8,000 passengers departing and arriving every hour, assuming Eurostar prices its seats to fill trains.

Crowding comes on the departures side of the station, so it’s here the challenge lies as HS1’s prospective designer must cope with HS1’s call for the station’s international zone to handle and process up to 5,000 passengers in a rolling 60-minute period.

That sits around my ‘back-of-an-envelope’ calculation of the figures generated by Eurostar’s ambition. But whether it’s Eurostar or one of the prospective operators that wins the passengers remains to be seen.

That’s because there’s another challenge. Where would new operators maintain trains?

HS1 permits trains built to the higher and wider loading gauge that’s available through and on the other side of the Channel Tunnel.

Eurostar’s Class 374 stock takes advantage of this, although its older Class 373s conform to the UK’s tighter gauge because they originally ran on classic lines between London Waterloo and the Channel Tunnel before HS1 opened fully in 2007.

This constrains the options to either using Eurostar’s Temple Mills depot in east London or building another depot somewhere. But any new depot would need its own link to HS1.

Temple Mills has come under the Office of Rail and Road’s spotlight, with the regulator publishing the findings of an investigation into depot capacity by consultant Ipex that reckoned the depot had “some” capacity for extra trains.

Temple Mills has eight covered roads in a maintenance shed, three stabling sidings, two roads for emptying toilet tanks, and four reception roads (all for 400-metre trains). It also has two roads leading to its wheel drop and one leading to a wheel lathe. Finally, it has two 200-metre cripple roads that are not electrified.

Eurostar stores four decommissioned Class 373 200-metre half-sets for spares on the cripple sidings and one of the reception roads.

Temple Mills’ normal capacity is 15 400-metre trains. Using the cripple sidings, wheel lathe and bogie drop roads increases this to 19. There is physical track space for another four 400-metre trains, but this would prevent normal depot operation. Ipex estimates that 20 sets is the depot’s exceptional capacity while still allowing it to function.

In normal use, Eurostar has six to ten sets on site (not including the decommissioned ‘373s’). The eight-road maintenance shed uses as few as three roads during the day (never more than seven from Ipex’s observations), but it’s full at night.

In the maintenance depot, Virgin wants one road during the day and two at night, Gemini wants one road day and night, and Evolyn wants two roads for 16 hours each day.

For stabling, Virgin wants space for seven 200-metre trains every night. With two in the shed, that leaves five outside. During the day, it wants three 400-metre stabling spaces. Gemini wants night stabling for three 200-metre trains and day stabling for one. Evolyn would bid for space for four 200-metre trains.

Ipex suggests that stabling more sets at Temple Mills is possible, particularly if the two cripple sidings are electrified and Eurostar removes its decommissioned sets, but there’s not enough space for everyone.

Night-time demands for the maintenance shed access can’t be met, although Ipex suggests one road might become available were Eurostar to change maintenance practices. That’s not enough for everyone.

Ipex found that Eurostar occasionally uses the maintenance shed for work that could be done elsewhere, because there’s nowhere else to move the set to (the stabling roads are full and Eurostar doesn’t use the three available reception roads for stabling).

This suggests that Ipex’s conclusion that some capacity exists is accurate. But that capacity doesn’t look easy to use, particularly if it’s split between rival operators potentially using different types of train. And there might not even be enough for one of Eurostar’s rivals.

Ipex suggests upgrading the toilet tanking roads to allow two trains to tank at once, rather than one currently. Or these two roads could be upgraded to allow sand and water fluid to be topped up, which would reduce dependence on the maintenance shed. Or sand filling capacity could be added to three of the reception roads which can already be used for light maintenance, train preparation and washer fluid top-up.

Other answers might come from Eurostar shifting more maintenance work to depots on the other side of the Channel Tunnel. Likewise, the prospective operators might conclude that such work is done away from London.

But it all leaves those potential operators looking at three knotty problems: winning authorisation for their trains to use the Channel Tunnel; fitting their facilities into a cramped St Pancras station; and finding depot space for maintenance.