posted by Charles H. Russo on Oct 29
Did you see this Eurostar commercial yet? Enough to make train nerds (and preservationists) cry. (Yes, the station really looks that hot.)
Well, it happened. Today, London came closer to Paris, and the United Kingdom got its first proper high-speed rail line, linking the renovated St. Pancras station to Gare du Nord in just 2 hours and 15 minutes, a savings of a little more than 20 minutes. Train nerds know that it takes a lot of work to eliminate a chunk of time like that from an itinerary. Well, safely anyway.
St. Pancras was a madhouse today. It’s nowhere near completed - there are just a few shops and a gigantic champagne bar, where you can get a $40 champagne breakfast and sit comfortably right next to the Eurostar tracks, watching the trains come and go.
Still, excitement was high. The British press, not given to gushing about much these days, actually used words like “remarkable.” The BBC got a chopper up in the sky to watch the first train depart around 11 o’clock in the morning. It was all very eye-in-the-sky.
I boarded the 2:05 pm train, we glided out of the station four minutes late at 2:09, barely having a moment to look at London before disappearing into a tunnel, which broke only for the unfinished Stratford station. Then, it was darkness again as we flew under the Thames, and then daylight again. A blink, and I missed the new Ebbsfleet Station, then Ashford (which, contrary to earlier reports is not being decommissioned as an International station), then Folkestone.
You wouldn’t appreciate it if you had never been on the Eurostar before, but it was really exciting to get out of Dodge so quickly, something that’s never happened before. Of course, once you emerge from the Chunnel, it is all status quo, flying across the northern French countryside (which, if you’re no familiar, is about as varied and dramatic as the Great Plains) and into Paris’ Nord station at just past 520p local time.
France wasn’t impressed. Not that anyone had asked them to be - this, was, after all, merely a correction of an embarrassing discrepancy between the two countries.
Besides, they had bigger fish to fry - a widespread transit strike had brought Paris to a halt. Consequently, there wasn’t much cheer in Gare du Nord upon our arrival. There wasn’t much of anything, except a few drunks and youngsters flouting the new no-smoking laws. Taxi rank was impossible. Traffic was wall-to-wall. So I did what you do in Paris when you need to get somewhere really fast — I grabbed a map and started walking, ending up an hour later at the Arc du Triomphe and my little hotel. Which, if you’re not following along on a map at home, is pretty much end-to-end. (Say what you want about Paris, but it sure is manageable. Though I hardly think that’s why people visit.)
Tomorrow: The photos! Lots of ‘em. I would put them up today, but I got separated from my luggage and can’t connect the camera to the laptop. Its a long story, you wouldn’t be interested.
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