The Channel Tunnel Rail Link

The Japanese were building them in the 1960s. The French have had them for twenty years, and the Germans for ten. Now we have the first dedicated high-speed rail line in Britain. A whole 46 miles long!

After speeding along the French LGV from Paris to Calais, and through the Channel Tunnel, trains between Paris and London will be using this new line to save about 20 minutes in their journey to London. And they they'll come to the end of it, and complete their journey along winding and congested commuter lines round south London to reach the terminus at Waterloo.

As an aside, I'm sure Waterloo was chosen as the initial terminus purely to piss off the French. Revenge for their Charles de Gaulle Airport.

It will be another four years before the second section of the line opens. Much of this section is in tunnel, burrowing under east London. It will terminate at the massive Victorian Gothic edifice of St. Pancras, currently much under-utilised since it's surburban services were diverted away into the cross-London Thameslink line in the 1980s.

How is it that the French could get their high speed line ready and open at the same time as the Channel Tunnel itself, while it takes us ten years to get round to ours? One major cause was the widespread opposition to the original route through the wealthy parts of Kent, which eventually led to the first proposal being abandoned in favour of the present more northerly route.

I remember a seeing a news report of a bunch of Wiccans conducting a banishing ritual which concluded in the sacrifice of a Hornby Mk3 coach (Hornby hadn't done a Eurostar in those days). Maybe we have them to blame.