Channel Tunnel operator ratchets up plans for Eurostar rival as competition heats up

The operator of the Channel Tunnel is ratcheting up preparations for a Eurostar rival, as a string of companies launch competing bids for a new rail service across the Channel.

Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, Spanish rail firm Evolyn and the newly established Dutch operator Heuro are all plotting a high-speed service to challenge Eurostar’s monopoly.

“We’ve got space, we’d like to see it filled,” John Keefe, chief corporate and public affairs officer at Getlink,  the Paris-based company which manages the Channel Tunnel’s infrastructure, told City A.M. in an interview.

Keefe said Getlink had seen strong interest from a number of other companies, who wished to remain unnamed at this stage. At least five other companies are understood to be interested in operating the route and the company has offered €50m in support to prospective challengers.

The amount of hours passengers are willing to spend via train has dramatically increased since the Channel Tunnel, which marks its 30th anniversary today, was first opened by Queen Elizabeth II.

“So from a concept when the tunnel opened that probably two and a half, three hours was going to be the maximum time anybody would spend on a train, that set the destination limit at sort of Paris and Brussels,” he explained.

But that barrier has been “broken very, very quickly” in recent years, paving the way for new route offerings across Europe.

Evolyn’s £1bn proposals involve taking passengers from London to Paris, with direct services extended from the French capital to countries like Germany and Switzerland.

“People are now pushing out and looking at destinations [like] Frankfurt and Cologne, destinations in Switzerland, Geneva or Zurich,” Keefe said.

Many in the industry believe a challenger to Eurostar is long overdue. A combination of the pandemic and Brexit has forced the high-speed operator to significantly reduce its route offerings.

Eurostar’s network has shrunk from 13 year-round stations pre-Brexit to just four, if you include a six month pause to its Amsterdam service from June this year.

The most high-profile attempt to break its monopoly came from Deutsche Bahn in 2010. The project though ultimately ran out of steam due to regulatory hurdles and difficulty approving new rolling stock.

But Keefe told City A.M. things had “moved on” since then. “The process has been simplified quite a lot. We’ve spent a lot of time working… with potential new entrants.”

He added talks had been ongoing with Eurostar to establish the right conditions at destination terminals such as Amsterdam.

There are also complexities surrounding how to link up the route between the different infrastructure managers across Europe, from HS1, to the Channel Tunnel, to SNCF Reseau, which manages French railway infrastructure.

“A lot of work has been done in pre-establishing those things. The paths, the nature of the high speed trains that will run across Europe in the future. The regulatory elements and the planning elements have largely been completed before a new entrant comes along,” Keefe said.

Capacity has also been raised as a potential hurdle for introducing new challengers, but Keefe said that would not be a problem.

“We’re very comfortable with the capacity, two years ago our maximum capacity, we were running up to 400 trains per day through the tunnel, both directions.

“Now, we’ve got a capacity which is around 1000 trains per day. So within that there’s plenty of scope to develop additional paths for high speed trains, railway freight, and also the passenger and truck shuttles.”