Postcard from the UK – high speed rail test

By Mark Carter

Of course the biggest headline grabbing incident on the transport front was the collapse of Eurostar services between London, Paris and Brussels which stranded tens of thousands of pre-Christmas travellers – the first major failure Eurostar has experienced in 15 years of operation.
With cancellations stretching into the New Year it may be some time before Eurostar regains its lost credibility.
Having said that, Eurostar continues to represent all that is great about high-speed rail travel and for me it also remains the catalyst that has dragged Britain’s previously neglected rail networks kicking and screaming into the 21st Century.
This is no better exemplified than by the transition to accommodate Eurostar and other high-speed services at London’s St Pancras International terminus – previously just plain old St Pancras. During its re-development it was being touted as the ‘place-to-meet’ for travellers – with the start of the journey being just as important as the destination.
While in this writer’s humble opinion it may not have yet fully lived up to this reputation, it is well on its way. A myriad array of high quality shops, restaurants and bars now occupy the cellars that originally lay below the main line platforms.
There was something a little surreal to be sitting in the Betjeman Arms pub sipping on a pint of best British bitter last week gazing out over the throng of cosmopolitan travellers heading to join their Eurostar services to Paris and Brussels.
Forty years earlier this same location was the ticket barrier for St Pancras Platform 8, with a host of smelly diesels heading of to such exotic locations as Derby and Sheffield, and at least one youthful train spotter eagerly noting down the numbers as they came and went.
You can still catch trains to Derby and Sheffield, but these now leave from four new platforms created as part of the redevelopment.
Another new development has been the recently introduced high-speed trains serving Kent commuters operated by the South Eastern franchise. These also use St Pancras International as their terminal and share much of the new high speed link to the Channel Tunnel with Eurostar services.
Previous trips I had taken on Eurostar started from the makeshift International terminal at Waterloo in London and the slow journey to the Channel Tunnel was over the electrified third rail commuter network. 
Things have moved in leaps and bounds since my last trip four years ago, with all high speed services now commencing their journey at St Pancras and the journey to the Chunnel being made over the 25kV overhead electrified High Speed 1 link.
It’s a bit too early to judge the success of the new South Eastern commuter services as they commenced operation just over a week before Christmas and patronage numbers will have been hit heavily by the recent adverse weather conditions.
I travelled on a couple of off peak services the day before the first major snow storms hit; the 1212 hrs from St Pancras to Ashford (continuing to Dover) and the 1343 hrs return (originating at Margate). Both trains were very lightly patronised and in fact on the return service there was only one other passenger in my carriage between Ashford and Ebbsfleet International.
I did check out the peak hour services and can at least report that the 1740 St Pancras to Dover service was well patronised, but there was little evidence of the normal peak hour scrummage associated with these services from other conventional London termini.
There obviously is still some slack in the timetable to accommodate delays on the new services. On the return we were six minutes late departing Ashford as the result of the high speed service rather bizarrely scheduled to use the same platform as what transpired to be a late running conventional commuter service.
However on the 81 kilometre run between Ashford and Stratford, normally timetabled for 32 minutes, we managed to reduce that deficit to just two minutes – which still only gives a relatively lazy average of speed of 173.5km/h (which includes a stop at Ebbsfleet) compared to an average of 151.9 km/h on the normal timetable.
The Hitachi Japanese-built Class 395 units use on the high speed commuter services have a top speed of 240 km/h, but as the above would suggest they are very rarely tested to this limit. None the less a journey time of 38 minutes for the 90 kilometres from St Pancras to Ashford is none to shabby and is certainly a revolution for the South East of England.
The acceleration and braking of the units was exemplary and outside of the tunnels, of which there are a few, the ride was quiet though with a little lateral hunting and would like my rail/wheel interface colleagues to explain to me.
There has been some criticism of the fares for the new services, but the high speed supplement is less than $10 one way and my off peak return for my brief high speed adventure came in at just under $50.
Unfortunately for the time being we can only dream of such developments in Australia, but hopefully the recent re-opening of the debate on the future viability of high-speed rail in Australia will allow us to look more closely at, and learn from developments such as these new high speed services in the UK and elsewhere.