Eurostar runs high-speed trains from London St Pancras through the Channel Tunnel to Paris, Brussels, Lille, Rotterdam and Amsterdam. London to Paris takes around 2 hours 16 minutes, city centre to city centre.
The tunnel
The Channel Tunnel — inevitably the Chunnel — opened in 1994 after six years of construction. It is 31 miles long, 23 of them under the sea, and has the longest undersea section of any tunnel in the world.
It is actually three bores: two rail tunnels and a smaller service tunnel between them for maintenance and emergency evacuation. Boring machines worked from both coasts and met in the middle in 1990, when a British and a French worker shook hands through the gap.
The idea is far older than the execution. A French engineer proposed one in 1802 — horse-drawn carriages, oil lamps, and an artificial island halfway for changing horses. A tunnel was actually begun in 1880 and abandoned when the British military objected on the grounds that it would make invasion easier, an anxiety that recurred for a century.
Using it
Eurostar is a train that behaves partly like a flight:
- Check in 60-90 minutes before departure. The gates close 30 minutes before, and they close absolutely.
- Security screening and passport control before boarding, not on arrival.
- Border checks are juxtaposed — you clear French entry controls in London, and British entry controls in Paris, so you step off the train and walk straight out.
- Two pieces of luggage plus hand baggage, with no weight limit worth worrying about.
Since Brexit, British passports are stamped and there are non-EU queues, which has lengthened the process. The EU’s Entry/Exit System will add biometric registration, and both operators have warned of longer waits.
Why take it
The comparison with flying favours the train for Paris and Brussels once airport transfers, check-in and security are counted. St Pancras is in central London and Gare du Nord is in central Paris; the airports are neither.
Carbon emissions are roughly a tenth of the equivalent flight, which is the other common reason.
St Pancras
Worth arriving early for. The station is a Victorian masterpiece — William Barlow’s 1868 train shed was the largest single-span structure in the world when built, and George Gilbert Scott’s Midland Grand Hotel in front of it is one of the great Gothic Revival buildings.
Both were nearly demolished in the 1960s. The poet John Betjeman led the campaign that saved them, and there is a statue of him under the roof looking up at it.
What Eurostar is not
It does not carry cars. Vehicles go on LeShuttle, a separate service run by Getlink from Folkestone to Calais, on which you drive onto a train and stay in your car for the 35-minute crossing.
Eurostar also no longer serves Ashford or Ebbsfleet in Kent, both suspended since the pandemic and not restored, which remains a live local grievance.