Eurostar is not going to maintain 67 trains at Temple Mills

Eurostar's PR machine pitched up in the radio studios of BBC on 13th March - CEO Gwendoline Cazenave was interviewed on the Today Programme on BBC Radio 4. There was one particularly interesting, and particularly disingenuous, line from her in the interview - that Eurostar would maintain 67 trains at the Temple Mills depot in east London, and that this necessitated expansion of depot facilities.

How does Cazenave even come up with 67 as a number?

That is the existing 17 Siemens Velaro e320 trains currently in Eurostar's fleet, plus the 30 Avelia Horizon trains ordered from Alstom, plus the additional 20 that they have as an option in that order.

But there is no way in the world Eurostar is going to use all 50 of the Avelia Horizon trains to London. If they can use those Avelia trains at all to London (that is open to some question), they most definitely are not going to use the whole fleet to through the Channel Tunnel - because they have 26 ex-Thalys trains for non-Channel Tunnel routes that they need to urgently replace (I examine Eurostar's fleet in more detail here). Given those ex-Thalys trains are currently maintained at Forest depot in Bruxelles and Le Landy depot in Paris, is Eurostar going to abandon all maintenance at those two sites, and move it all to London? When not all of the trains are going to even run to London?

No, of course not.

Eurostar will not need space to maintain 67 trains at Temple Mills.

Looks like an effort to make life difficult for Virgin Trains as far as I can tell. And try to up the political pressure on the Department for Transport.