LONDON, 17 September 2003 — British Prime Minister Tony Blair yesterday opened an inaugural section of the country’s first new rail line in more than a century, a high-speed link with the Channel Tunnel and the rest of Europe.
The 46-mile (74-km) section, which carries paying passengers from Sept. 28, is the first ever high-speed line in a country which pioneered rail travel in the 19th century but has lagged far behind other European nations in recent decades.
Blair, who accepted a certificate formally opening the line at Waterloo station in London, said the completion of the Channel Tunnel Rail Link’s first section, on time and within budget, was “a great omen to the future”.
“The work which has gone into this should give us some optimism as well as some spur about what could be done in the future,” he told assembled railway dignitaries from Britain, France and Belgium.
Work on the 1.9 billion pound ($3 billion) section of track, running from the Channel Tunnel through the county of Kent, southern England, began in October 1998.
It will cut 20 minutes from the train journey times to both Paris and Brussels, with a further 20 minutes shaved off when the remainder of the line, terminating at London’s St Pancras station, is completed by 2007.
Costing an estimated 3.3 billion pounds, the second section will include over 15 miles (24 km) of tunneling, including one under the river Thames.
The new link is a welcome boost for a country which has suffered terrible woes with its rail system in recent years, including a spate of fatal crashes.
Currently, Eurostar rail services through the Channel Tunnel have to slow to a relative crawl as they enter England to cope with the older, lower grade tracks.
The quicker journey times will also prove a boon for Eurostar, which has suffered recently from the general economic gloom as well as the effect of low-cost air fares in Europe.
Yesterday, Eurostar president Guillaume Pepy told French financial newspaper La Tribune that the stretch of new track should bring in another 700,000 passengers a year. “It’s a second birth for Eurostar,” said Pepy.
In July, a Eurostar train testing the new section of track smashed the British rail speed record, hitting 208 miles (334.7 km) per hour.
However such speeds have been commonplace elsewhere in Europe for decades, with France’s first TGV line opening as long ago as 1981.
Britain’s poor rail network is blamed by experts on decades of under-investment coupled with a botched privatization of the then-nationalized British Rail in 1996.
This initiative put rail services into the hands of a series of different private firms, with another company, Railtrack, responsible for handing out contracts to maintain tracks, stations and other infrastructure.
After problems including a series of crashes, Railtrack was put into receivership in 2001 with a new, non-profit firm called Network Rail obliged to pick up the pieces.
Blair conceded yesterday that more needed to be done.
“The truth is we need to renovate a large part of our transport infrastructure in this country and we have shown through the Channel Tunnel Rail Link... that it can happen,” he said.
