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From The Independent (http://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/eurostar-london-to-brussels-reduced-services-terrorist-attacks-cheap-train-tickets-a7429466.html)


Seat numbers on the Brussels route reduce by just 6.5% if you take into account the increase in seats by switching the rolling stock.

Even though mainland Western Europe is a single free trade / free flow area these days, international train services are not as frequent / widespread as national ones in the areas around the country borders.  In other words, on those occasions I travel by train I can look at a map and see hourly services on a spider's web of lines in two countries, yet only occasional links between those webs over the borders.   There are longer distance international trains that are distinctly less frequent that the regular national services, with the tail end of national local series making an almost apologetic incursion at a few places to the first stop beyond the border, at which point one transfers to a service of the newly entered nation.

The article refers to the drop of leisure traffic because of terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels, and the lack of floods of people from Europe visiting when they were expected because of a drop in the value of the pound after the Brexit vote.  I find myself wondering if traffic has also dropped or failed to materialise towards the UK because the rest of the people of Europe feel unwelcome (remembering that the ordinary french or belgian person sees only what their press is saying) and because some of us from the UK are nervous as to the personal reception we'll get there.

I *think* Eurostar - though commercial - is largely SNCF (french nationalised railway) owned, and also question whether previous service levels might have been in excess of what was needed for the flow, but maintained / provided for political 'unity' reasons that have been smashed.    And finally, I suspect that a long distance international service is far less likely to loose business when there are two and a half hour gaps in the service than a local / regional service - people may grumble, but they probably won't move to flying over it - where, although there are more flights a day than trains now, there are two operator and (I presume) no cross ticketing, so still less flexibility.

 

They are unable to run shorter trains through the tunnel....have to be full length, something to do with the tunnel metrics?

IIRC the train has to be long enough that a door is always within a carriage length of an emergency exit, so you don't get people wandering through tunnels in the event of an evacuation.

That original requirement for a train to be long enough to bridge two cross passageway doors was removed about two years ago (perhaps longer) after negotiations with the tunnel safety authority, as part of the initial changes to allow other operator's stock to operate e.g. DB.  It turns out the North of London Eurostar sets were never long enough to met the requirement in the first place.

IIRC the requirement to split trains in two halves, and therefore have a second driver, was also removed in the same changes.

Paul

Thanks for that clarification Paul ... I was just writing the following / have moved much into the past tense having read your update .... guess there's an opportunity now, or is the market too mature and the window of opportunity gone?

Emergency doors between the tunnels are every 375 metres ... and the requirement was for trains stopped to be opposite at least one door no matter where they stop, thus setting a minimum train length with through corridor of 15 x 26 metre carriages.  Old link at http://www.railwaygazette.com/news/policy/single-view/view/era-recommends-changes-to-channel-tunnel-safety-regime.html to the safety regime. One effect of this is that in order to meet the safety regime, a London - Paris / London - Brussels service with onward changes there could work commercially, whereas services such as Leeds to Frankfurt, Cardiff to Amsterdam, Edinburgh to Barcelona, Plymouth to Stockholm or Llandudno to Les Sables-d’Olonne were not classified safe, even if they would make huge sense as 8 car trains offering franchise competition on their UK legs to London and Ashford, and very real competition with airlines beyond.

The reqyuirement is still there according to posters on uk.railway forum. Can you show that it isn't?

Sounds like they should have put the emergency tunnel exits closer together, but perhaps there were sound engineering or behavioural reasons not to.

In terms of international services, an oddity is or used to be a local service in Poland running between two Polish towns (I think it was Przemyśl to Krościenko) over then Soviet, now Ukrainian, territory. It was purely a domestic service with no border stops or passport checks, although Soviet border guards did board the train at the last stop before the border disembark at the next, the line being an artifact of post-war border changes with 19th-century networks. There was one incident in the 1980s when Solidarity activists flushed leaflets out of the track-emptying toilet; the Soviet border guards halted the train until every single one had been picked up.

Or cost.  Several compromises were made to keep the cost down given the financial challenges effectively broke the company building it. I recall one to be that the maximum speed of trains through the tunnel was reduced. Easy in hindsight to say that a little more should have been spent, but the original shareholders lost all value in it if I recall with those that lent the debt ending up owning the majority of the business after a financial reconstruction.

The change to drop the second driver requirement is on the IGC website (http://www.channeltunneligc.co.uk/IGC-decisions,26.html?lang=en):

Eurotunnel's 2010 Network Statement (http://www.eurotunnelfreight.com/uploadedFiles/freight/2010ETNetworkStatement.pdf) contains this in Annex 2:

So it wasn't an absolute requirement. The 2015 Network Statement  (http://www.eurotunnelgroup.com/uploadedfiles/assets-uk/the-channel-tunnel/23122013-drrns2015_en1.pdf)has no such statement.

The change may be in the IGC site ... hidden under a heap of bureaucratic verbiage.  But I suspect it's the operator's interpretation of a more general safety requirement, approved as part of the Network Statement.

The Siemens Velaro e320 trains for Eurostar were approved by a decision of 19 November 2015.

But aren't the e320s actually longer tgan the older Eurostars, not shorter? The take aclot more pax....

Yes - that line was just put in for the record.  l

If you read those words, they ask for 375 m omitting the power cars as there are no passenger doors in the them. So that reduces the length from 387 to 343 m - less than 375.

These Velaros are 400 m long, and do have doors in the end cars (but are they passenger ones?). What they don't have (as I read somewhere) is the ability to be split and each half to be driven on its own. I can't see that requirement written anywhere - though maybe it was removed before 2010. In any case, it's history now.

So Eurostar are stuck with long, large-capacity trains.

Which is the point I was originally making - they can't run trains with lengths suitable for lower loadings (by removing carriages effectively), hence needing to remove whole trains to reduce capacity

Why not? There were two desirables (not true requirements) up to 2010 (or maybe later), for 375 m length and for end-to-end gangways. The latter really makes sense only with the ability to split the train in the middle as well, wherever that was stated. But neither appears to apply now.

Of course such requirements may now be somewhere else. The main place would the the RST TSI - but that says very little about trains, and nothing about this kind of detail.

What I should have added: The end-to-end gangway requirement on its own would (if present) preclude half-length trains run in pairs and split for two destinations. That offers another way of reducing capacity, but without reducing service intervals. Siemens would have been quite happy to make them like that, I'm sure, but evidently they weren't asked.

Hmmm, I still think it's more than desirables, sorry. And you can't produce any evidence either. Other fora seem to think this way too.

To be honest, I doubt the marginal cost of an extra vehicle is that high, what you are paying big money for though is the crew plus track access through the tunnel and through the relevant countries, so if you ain't got enough bums on seats, that's not being covered.

Could also be viewed as an opportunistic move on the part of Eurostar - by cutting services now whilst it's understandable due to terrorists, Brexit, economy etc, they are bolstering their financial position. If they leave it and have to do it in the middle of Brexit they could open themselves and the French government open to all sorts of nasty headlines. 

I think I can see how that's gone now - yet hasn't really.

Originally just one safety requirement specifically about passenger trains came from the concession:
- and even that is secondary to Eurotunnel's operating rules.

The rest were a matter of Eurotunnel alone, or Eurostar in negotiation with them, proposing safety rules to the IGC (Intergovernmental Commission). The IGC approved those based on advice from their safety advisers, and the resulting rules were not, I'm pretty sure, published.

Since then the legal framework has changed because of domestic changes in Britain and France, and a bigger one with the introduction of the European Railway Agency and the TSIs. At the same time, the IGC held a review and consultation about the operating experience and whether all the rules were needed, during which Eurostar and other operators (DB) started asking if they could other trains, even ones not designed specifically for the tunnel.

The IGC came out with their conclusions (http://www.channeltunneligc.co.uk/spip.php?action=acceder_document&arg=152&cle=afc9f895b3a111e715b8cca09821c197&file=pdf%2F100331_-_D15012_Parent-consultees_cons_conclusions.pdf) in 2010, removing some requirements. They notified the ERA, who decided to respond to that (in 2011) as an enquir (http://www.era.europa.eu/Document-Register/Documents/Technical%20opinion%20of%20ERA%20regarding%20the%20conclusions%20of%20the%20IGC%20letter%20of%2031st%20March%202010%20EN.pdf)y about its compatibility with the TSIs. It isn't clear if there has been an further change by the IGC in response to the ERA.

The general trend in these safety regimes has been to get less prescriptive, and rely more on applicants making a safety case to be approved against a set of principles. In railways this involved applying the "Common Safety Methods" in a risk assessment. So while Eurotunnel do still put the conditions for access in their Network Statements, the safety rules are only referred to, and even may have fewer fixed rules.

The contentious rules about minimum length and end to end gangways are there for one reason: to allow evacuation via one or two doors close to a cross-passageway where the tunnel is full of smoke (or other similar hazards). They were "normally required" before to provide "the optimum conditions of safety". Now, the approach is to say other trains are allowed if you can make a convincing case that they can be evacuated safely in the event of a fire. So far no-one has, and it's hard to see how they could unless the safety philosophy changes.

That makes more sense. Thanks