UK Rail and Trains

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Eurostar plans direct trains from London to Frankfurt and Geneva (www.bbc.co.uk)

submitted 1 month ago by Patch@feddit.uk to c/rail@feddit.uk

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[–] zerakith@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I agree and its strange its not been mentioned at all. It seems odd to me given how much capacity there is unused in the tunnel itself that the warehousing wasn't built to an equivalent spec. Its possible it was planned for depots to be on the onward HS routes that never happened (i.e. HS2 via the HS1-HS2 link).

It would be a small amount of money when compared to road building budgets but car brain dominates DfT (and Treasury) thinking.

[–] Patch@feddit.uk 2 points 1 month ago

Exactly! Tunnel capacity is a hard upper limit, but in an ideal world you'd be using every minute of that capacity for either passengers or freight. Depot capacity issues are very solvable.

Station capacity is also an issue (particularly passport control issues at St Pancras, which limits how many passengers they can process even beyond platform capacity), but that's relatively solvable too. One of the competing proposals (possibly the Gemini one?) wanted to make Stratford International its terminus rather than St Pancras to avoid station congestion. If HS1-HS2 link were back in play, that would open up other options for alternative termini too (such as Old Oak Common, or HS2 stations out of London).