I was a guest this week on the Green Signals podcast about rivals to Eurostar and their chances of success. You can watch it here:
You can likewise get it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Amazon Music.
Also – amazingly! – the comments on Youtube are mostly constructive. That is testimony to the solid community around the podcast that Richard Bowker (who interviewed me) and Nigel Harris have built. Somehow the sound quality was a bit ropey though – we’ll improve that next time.
Much of the discussion is around the submissions of four potential rivals to Eurostar (Virgin Trains, Gemini, Evolyn, Trenitalia) for access to the Temple Mills depot in east London – you can find all the documents submitted to ORR here, although some are heavily redacted. I have also written a bit more about Virgin’s choices here.
The impression from Virgin Trains, Gemini and Evolyn – who respectively propose to buy 12, 10 and 12 200m long trains each – is how much their strategy is based on the constraints at Temple Mills. It is basically designing your rolling stock (and hence routes served) strategy to match space that there is at that depot. And the general assumption is that if a firm fails to get capacity at Temple Mills (and we assume only 1 will succeed) their efforts will cease. So up to 12 non-Eurostar 200m trains, while Eurostar has at least 25 trains, and all of them 375-400m in length – so only a quarter of potential seats are not going to be on board Eurostars.
Also reading between the lines of the ORR submissions, a big question mark emerges about Trenitalia’s commitment to running trains to London. Unlike the other three submissions they are not very clear about what they propose to do, nor the size of the fleet they will use, and Evolyn – their supposed partner – submitted separately. But Trenitalia’s submission is also the most heavily redacted of the four, so perhaps we the public are simply not entitled to the detail for now. Anyway, it’s one to keep an eye on.
Last but not least, a date for your diaries: lunchtime on Monday 17th November I will release the report about all of these Channel Tunnel topics, finalising my #CrossChannelRail project that started in spring 2025. Further details will follow!