On Tue, 16 Nov 2004 09:33:28 +0000, Paul Terry
wrote:


To a large extent it will depend on whether those needing to go to
Brussels and Paris for business meetings, or choosing to go there on
leisure breaks, live mainly in SW London or in Beckton etc. I suspect it
is mostly the former, and Eurostar are therefore going to be forced to
start building a new customer base from scratch instead of building on
their existing market.

I think the point is that a lot of Eurostar users don't live in either
South West London or in Beckton. From my present address, in North
London, St Pancras will be marginally easier than Waterloo but the
difference won't affect my decision whether to go by train or air.
That's probably true of many Eurostar customers: not just ones who
live in London but ones who live in Cheltenham or Philadelphia or
Poitiers or wherever.

Moreover, I used to live in SW London and Heathrow was very difficult
to get to by public transport. If I still lived there, I'd be
disappointed to be forced to go via St Pancras but I'd still do that
in preference to going to Heathrow. When I lived in SW London I still
preferred rail to air as a way of getting to Edinburgh, despite
needing to get to Kings Cross (usually via Vauxhall) and a longer
journey time overall. I did once (this is going back a fair while - I
don't think it's possible these days) get a direct train from Clapham
Junction to Manchester to avoid the tube journey to Euston. But to be
honest it was usually easier to go to Euston than to arrange my trip
to coincide with one of the very few trains that made that run.

So I would be surprised if Eurostar will in practice lose much of its
existing business through the move to St Pancras. Given that SWT
could probably do with the capacity freed up on the lines out of
Waterloo, if not necessarily at the station, the commercial case to
stop running Eurostars looks compelling.

Still, I'll be sad to see no more Eurostars at Waterloo, if only
because the international station there is such a fine building and it
won't seem the same if it's just used for commuter trains

Martin