THE board of Eurostar has voted to proceed with a deal worth at least 600 million Euros to acquire 10 Siemens Velaro-D trains, each 400m long. They would allow Eurostar to operate new routes to the Netherlands and Germany, but the proposal is causing ripples in France, where ministers are opposing the purchase of foreign trains by an affiliate company of the state-owned rail operator SNCF.

Eurostar is gearing up to meet the competition which is posed by the introduction of open access on international EU routes at the start of this year, and the first visible manifestation of the new, liberal rules will be the arrival of a Deutsche Bahn ICE set under test at St Pancras International on 19 October.

DB wants to run trains between London and key German cities such as Frankfurt and Cologne, and various start dates have been quoted, including 2012 and 2013.

There are spare 'north of London' Eurostars in existence, which should have been used for regional Eurostars to British provincial cities. These services were never launched because journey times would have been uncompetitive compared to those offered by budget airlines.

Even though the NOL sets would theoretically be available to run on new routes, too many additional on-board systems would be needed to make them compatible with the lines in the Netherlands and Germany.

New trains, however, can be designed from the start to allow for these systems, which will include ERTMS as well as domestic Dutch signalling and traction current.

A further advantage of the new fleet will be its size: as the Velaros will never need to run on the British domestic network, unlike the original Eurostars when they used Waterloo, the ‘next generation’ Eurostars will be built to full European loading gauge.

As such, they would also be suitable for HS2 within Britain when that is built, and could run beyond London to Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds.

But even as Eurostar starts to sketch its new, enlarged network, tempers are rising in France at the prospect of a company partly owned by SNCF buying trains built in Germany.

The French government is said to be urging Eurostar to buy its trains only from French-owned Alstom, and there are accusations from the German side that the Anglo-French Inter Governmental Commission, which governs Channel Tunnel operating rules, will also be pressed not to permit Velaros to operate in service through the Tunnel on the grounds of safety.

This particular political row has to be carried on in whispers, because officially favouring one state’s train-builder over another in this way would be a breach of European Union law.

Back to News