Swiss Federal Railways Targets London As It Seeks More Cross-Border High Speed Trains
The title of this post is the same as that of this article on the Railway Gazette.
This is the introductory paragraph.
Swiss Federal Railways is looking at ordering up to 40 high speed trainsets for use on international services to Italy and France, and ’potentially for other destinations such as Barcelona and London’.
There also three paragraphs, which talk about Switzerland and London services.
SBB has also examined the possibility of launching a direct service between Switzerland and London, concluding that this would be technically feasible but challenging.
The need to provide security and border controls at all the stations served has long been a barrier to new services through the Channel Tunnel. However, SBB believes this may be possible at Zürich HB, Basel SBB and Genève Cornavin.
SBB would like to offer such a service and is to further develop its plans, but implementation is not seen as possible until the 2030s at the earliest.
These are my thoughts.
The Channel Tunnel Is Being Opened Up For Other Operators
The Channel Tunnel is at last looking to put on other services.
Switzerland could be easy technically, but there is the security and border controls, as the article points out.
But I see sorting security and border controls as an opportunity, not a problem.
Surely, a workable solution would have export potential all round the world.
London And Geneva Is Only Six Hours On The Train
Six hours in comfort on a train, would not bother me!
Switzerland And London Are Both Suitable Destinations For Year-Round, Short-Break Trips
C and myself were always popping off for short breaks, as it suited our work patterns.
She would sometimes say, that a case had come out and we would nip off somewhere for a couple of days.
I think, that more people will work flexibly and will have more gaps, where two days in Geneva or Zurich would fit. Provided, they could just turn up and go.
I also have done several business and leisure trips to Switzerland.
Fast Direct Trains To Switzerland Would Make Italy More Accessible
I have taken trains to Italy and it is a long way.
But breaking the journey in Switzerland could make the journey easier and you could use one city going South and another going North.
When I stayed in Geneva to go to CERN, I got a free day ticket for the buses and trams thrown in, which was very useful.
Will The Swiss Offer A Rail Pass For All Their High Speed Trains?
I wonder, if the Swiss have this in mind, as they already offer passes that include all Swiss public transport including all the cable cars.
A Swiss High Speed Rail Pass might allow me to go London and Florence, Naples or Rome and return all on one ticket.
Americans wanting to get away from Trump could fly to Switzerland and then explore Europe in Swiss trains, with no worries.
Conclusion
The Swiss should take their fingers out and go for it!
Appeasement 2.0
The low point of Russia’s war in Ukraine is that Trummkopf, has repeated Chamberlain’s mistake at Munich and presented Putin with Appeasement 2.0.
I wasn’t around in the days of Munich and Chamberlain, but my father was well-informed, as he was in Geneva doing something possibly at the League of Nations and heard a lot of the truth about what was going on in Czechoslovakia and Ukraine at first hand. He believed there was little to choose between Hitler and Stalin on the scale of evil.
In the 1970s, I worked with an Jewish Austrian engineer, who was called Samuels, at the GLC, who had escaped from Austria just before WW2 and then spent the war in the Royal Engineers in bomb disposal. After the war, he was an observer at Nuremberg.
He was one of the most amazing people, I’ve ever met and he taught me a lot about project management.
Aggregation In Artemis
One of the features of Artemis was aggregation, which enabled the project manager to total up the resources they’d need for a project.
I might have programmed the original aggregation for Mr. Samuels, but I can certainly remember discussing it with him. He needed it to check that particular sub-contractors weren’t overstreching themselves.
I lost contact with Mr. Samuels, when his wife died and he moved to CERN in Geneva. But he’s one of several people, who helped frame the design of Artemis.
Soviet War Crimes
This Wikipedia entry is entitled Soviet War Crimes.
This is the first paragraph.
From 1917 to 1991, a multitude of war crimes and crimes against humanity were carried out by the Soviet Union or any of its Soviet republics, including the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and its armed forces. They include acts which were committed by the Red Army (later called the Soviet Army) as well as acts which were committed by the country’s secret police, NKVD, including its Internal Troops. In many cases, these acts were committed upon the direct orders of Soviet leaders Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin in pursuance of the early Soviet policy of Red Terror as a means to justify executions and political repression. In other instances they were committed without orders by Soviet troops against prisoners of war or civilians of countries that had been in armed conflict with the USSR, or they were committed during partisan warfare.
As a teenager, my father used to tell me stories of atrocities by the Soviet Union and told me, he believed Stalin was on a level with Hitler.
One of the worst atrocities was the Katyn massacre in 1940, which is described in this Wikipedia entry and starts with this paragraph.
The Katyn massacre was a series of mass executions of nearly 22,000 Polish military and police officers, border guards, and intelligentsia prisoners of war carried out by the Soviet Union, specifically the NKVD (the Soviet secret police), at Joseph Stalin’s order in April and May 1940. Though the killings also occurred in the Kalinin and Kharkiv NKVD prisons and elsewhere, the massacre is named after the Katyn forest, where some of the mass graves were first discovered by Nazi German forces in 1943.
I haven’t found out, what my father was doing in 1940, but I am fairly sure he knew of the Katyn and other massacres, as he occasionally commented.
Note.
- The involvement of the NKVD.
- The Katyn massacre is a sub-plot in the film Enigma, which has this Wikipedia entry.
I took this picture of a memorial to Katyn in the centre of Birmingham.
I believe that we ignore the lessons of Soviet behaviour at Katyn, at our peril.
In Vladimir Putin’s Wikipedia entry, there is this paragraph about his parents.
Putin’s mother was a factory worker, and his father was a conscript in the Soviet Navy, serving in the submarine fleet in the early 1930s. During the early stage of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, his father served in the destruction battalion of the NKVD. Later, he was transferred to the regular army and was severely wounded in 1942. Putin’s maternal grandmother was killed by the German occupiers of Tver region in 1941, and his maternal uncles disappeared on the Eastern Front during World War II.
It appears that Putin Senior left the NKVD destruction battalion before 1942. Does that mean he could have been at Katyn?
I do suspect, that Putin Senior told some interesting stories to his son, about the correct ways to deal with your opponents and wage a war.
Conclusion
We are treading a very similar path over eighty years later.
Getlink To Enable The Doubling Of Direct High Speed Rail Services From The UK Over The Next 10 Years Via The Channel Tunnel
The title of this post, is the same as that of this press release from Getlink.
This is the sub-heading.
This doubling will be achieved by reducing the “time to market” from 10 to 5 years for operators who intend to launch new services between London and Cologne, London and Frankfurt, London and Geneva, London and Zurich.
These three paragraphs introduce the press release.
On 6 May 2024, Eurotunnel, a wholly owned subsidiary of Getlink, will celebrate 30 years since the opening of the Channel Tunnel and the introduction of the first LeShuttle and LeShuttle Freight rail services linking Folkestone (Kent)to Coquelles (Pas-de-Calais). This year will also mark the 30th anniversary of the first direct rail links between London and Paris, and London and Brussels.
Three decades after this pioneering step forward in Europe’s rail network, and in the wake of the development of the recently introduced link between London and Amsterdam, Eurotunnel is aiming to further accelerate the low-carbon mobility of people between the UK and continental Europe by doubling the number of new direct destinations from London via the Channel Tunnel over the next 10 years.
The reduction in the time needed to launch new services to just 5 years is the fruit of the work by Eurotunnel, the infrastructure manager and keystone of the cross-Channel high-speed links, in cooperation with partners from across the European ecosystem (infrastructure managers, authorities, manufacturers, regulators).
Getlink will use these four steps towards simplification.
- Market research carried out by Eurotunnel to identify destinations.
- Standardisation of Tunnel regulations with the relevant authorities.
- Integration of tunnel specific criteria with manufacturers in their standard rolling stock offering.
- Preparing cross-Channel connections with network operators and stations.
It will be so good to have more services between London and Europe.
Edinburgh Tourist Tax Could Be £2 Per Room, Per Night
The title of this post is the same as this article on the BBC.
Will it actually make any difference?
- I looked up the price of two nights in a Premier Inn in the City Centre for next week and they want to charge me £263.
- Glasgow was £137 and Stirling £105 for Premier Inns close to the stations.
- Will the tax apply to Airbnb?
I do think, we’re going to see some innovative tourist taxes and rewards.
For instance, all hotels in Geneva must give you a voucher for a day’s free travel on public transport. This applies for everything from a camp-site to a five-star hotel.
Some hotels in Hamburg, do something similar.
Eurostar To And From Amsterdam
On Tuesday I took Eurostar to Amsterdam.
The trip took three hours and forty-one minutes with stops at Brussels and Rotterdam.
The Brussels stop allows passengers to leave and join, but Rotterdam only allows passengers to leave.
As the number of passengers grow between London and Amsterdam, could there come a time, when some or all Amsterdam services don’t need to stop at Brussels.
If so, how much time would this save?
Current stops by Eurostar take the following times.
- Ashford – 9 mins.
- Calais – 3 mins
- Ebbsfleet – 6 mins.
- Lille – 14 minutes
These times have been calculated by looking at similar services that have different stopping patterns.
Note that, Calais and Ebbsfleet are faster as they are stops on the direct route.
So I suspect that if an Amsterdam service could go through Brussels without stopping, something between 9-12 minutes could be saved.
This could bring the journey time between London and Amsterdam closer to three and a half hours.
What would that time do for sales of tickets?
Eurostar Hold A Lot Of Cards
Eurostar are in a very good position on this route.
- They could run a flagship express service twice a day for those in a hurry.
- This could be backed up by slightly slower services calling at places from or to where passengers want to go. These would include Ebbsfleet, Ashford and Antwerp.
- Immigration and security clearance is probably under thirty minutes at the start of the journey and perhaps ten at the end.
- Immigration and security times will be reduced, as procedures get better.
- St. Pancras, Rotterdam Centraal and Amsterdam Centraal are all very well-connected stations.
- Extra services can be added as demand dictates.
- Eurostar is more diabled-friendly and those in smaller scooters can drive in!
- They could extend some Brussels services to Amsterdam.
- I estimate that just under 4,000,000 people live within the North and South Circular Roads and have easy access by public transport to St. Pancras.
They can also create a very intelligent booking computer system, that optimises their services. Budget airlines have been doing this for years.
What About The Airlines?
Note the numbers of passengers who fly.
According to Skyscanner, there are upwards of two hundred flights a day between London and Amsterdam. An Airbus A320 holds 150 passengers, so if there are only a hundred per flight, that is 20,000 passengers per day.
Looking at the 6th of June, Eurostar are running nine trains between London and Brussels. As each new Class 374 train can hold 900 passengers, that is around 8,000 seats per day.
So the airlines have much more capacity than Eurostar and they can add and remove it, easier than Eurostar can?
The Comfort Factor
I haven’t travelled in steerage on the new trains, as I always pay about thirty-forty pounds extra for Premium Economy, so I get the following benefits.
- A very pleasant gluten-free meal.
- A much more spacious environment.
- It’s also rare that I don’t get a window seat.
But if I did use steerage, it would be a more pleasant experience than flying on a budget airline.
I think it’s been about ten years since I flew to a city within a two-hour flight of London, where there was a rail alternative.
I also tend to come home by rail, where I often get a connection to Brussels or Paris to catch a late Eurostar to London.
Comparing London-Amsterdam With London-Edinburgh
Both routes take about four hours by train, with the Dutch route slightly quicker.
Generally, trains operate between London and Edinburgh half-hourly for much of the day, whereas Eurostar only runs twice a day.
Amsterdam/Rotterdam/Schipol Airport is surely a much bigger market in terms of possible passengers, than the Edinburgh catchment area.
I think we’ll see the astute Dutch, using Eurostar as a marketing tool to attract more passengers to the Netherlands and London’s next airport at Schipol.
Especially, as the British seem very happy with a four-hour train ride in comfort.
Eurostar Will Grow Between London And Amsterdam
For these and other rambling reasons, I think that Eurostar to Amsterdam will grow to be a successful route.
The one thing they must do, is to make it possible to come back to London, without having to clear immigration and security in Brussels.
But Eurostar know that!
Amsterdam Is Just The Hors D’Oeuvre!
Once Eurostar and the Dutch get the route between London and the Netherlands working smoothly, I don’t think it will be long before other routes are inaugurated.
Eurostar have said these could be.
- Bordeaux
- Cologne and Frankfurt
- Geneva
The key will be getting the immigration and security smooth.
I think it will continue to improve, as it seems to do, every time I travel.
Remember, the Belgians, Dutch, French, Germans and Swiss will want it to be smooth, as they will want to market their delights to a whole new market, so suspect a lot of co-operation, despite the decision of Brexit.
But, I think that a limit on a journey time of four or five hours would cut out a lot of other destinations.
Although many of the destinations like Brussels, Cologne, Frankfurt, Geneva and Paris will be places to have an enjoyable day or two before taking another train ride further afield.
The 15:00 From Amsterdam Centraal To Berlin
This train that leaves Amsterdam Centraal just under two hours after the Eurostar arrives and can take you all the way to Berlin, arriving at 21:22.
But this train with a change at Osnabruck, gives you a stopping-off point to Bremen, Hamburg and the Northern part of Germany.
I first came across Osnabruck, when I was left there without a train by Deutsche Bahn, as I wrote about in From Hamburg To Osnabruck By Train.
But I found a delightful hotel on the station forecourt, called the Advena Hotel Hohenzollern.
Trip Advisor give it four out of five and currently say deals are available at under seventy pounds a night.
Osnabruck is not a tourist town, but it sits where the North-South and East-West rail routes cross.
Conclusion
As the network develops, I believe that a whole new form of tourism will take advantage.
London To Geneva Has Just Got Easier
I like Geneva, as did my father, who actually lived there for a time. I’ve flown once recently when I went to CERN and I’ve also returned by train.
The train journey via Paris can be a bit tedious, as you have to get across Paris, which often isn’t the easiest thing to do.
But now according to Modern Railways, Eurostar are offering a service four days a week, with a simpler change at Lille. Here’s what they say.
The service will be available on Mondays, Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays. Departure from London St Pancras International at 12.58 will allow passengers to arrive in Geneva at 20.16 (local time) with a 37-minute connection at Lille. The return departure from Geneva will be at 08.30, with a 33-minute connection at Lille leading to an arrival at St Pancras at 14.05. On Sundays the return departure runs exactly two hours later, with a slightly longer connection at Lille but the same overall journey time to St Pancras. Tickets can be purchased from Thursday 9 October with return fares starting from £116.
That sounds like a relaxed way to do the trip.
For one of my Home Runs, the 08:30 departure from Geneva would be ideal, as Geneva is a good place to spend a relaxed night, after racing across Europe on umpteen trains.
From Geneva To Paris
Four words sum up the TGV Duplex trip from Geneva to Paris; fast, frequent, comfortable and boring. This bridge was the only interesting thing I was able to photograph.
From Geneva To Paris
To describe the trip as boring is actually a complement and I arrived in Paris just over three hours after I left Geneva.
If only all travel was as simple.
At Geneva Station Use The Back Entrance For France
there was some work going on at Geneva station and I had difficulty finding the platforms for the TGV to Paris.
A Welcoming Lith In Geneva
This excellent lith with a map and information, was placed just out of Geneva station on the way to the lake.
A Welcoming Lith In Geneva
Every station exit in the world should have one!
I can’t find anything about these liths and their maps on the Internet.
The Anonymous Widower 