Thread by @jonworth

The essential problem for Eurostar is UK Govt doesn't know what it *wants* from long distance international rail through the Channel Tunnel

The UK Government wants to minimise its costs, and doesn't want problems, but beyond that is *has no answers*

Does the UK believe in competition on the London-Paris/Brussels routes? And if so, what sort?

Is that people might fly instead competition enough? Or is on-rail competition also desirable?

Until COVID hit, Eurostar could afford to be more expensive than flights, because the time saved and better convenience meant people favoured the train

But is that the right answer?

Would it make sense to mode-maximise instead? Not least if reducing flying for climate reasons is a supposed aim (and is part of the UK's justification for HS2)

If so, UK would need to get serious about Eurostar or whatever successor company, but then what's the strategy?

It could take the older French TGV public service model, and make sure a good number of seats were available for a low price - pricing those seats to get price conscious customers off the planes. This would take Eurostar back to its 1990s roots

Or it could allow competition to drive down prices (but that would need major changes to the operation framework, and probably extra rolling stock) - but Trenitalia vs. Italo on Milan-Rome shows what's possible

Or you could even envisage a Budgetstar that ran Stratford to Marne-la-Vallee rivalling the Eurostar that ran St Pancras to Paris Nord, with the Budgetstar being something akin to OUIGO in France

Yet if the UK Government keeps its current line - just wanting the problem to go away - Eurostar is going to go to the wall, and a SNCF Thalys-style operation will emerge instead - an even more rent seeking, anti competitive monopoly operator than Eurostar is now

Other options are available, but each of them would require *action* from the UK to achieve, yet having that sort of action in the post-Brexit context looks like a long shot to me

Why, you can imagine Grant Shapps sneering in London, should we care about the cheese eating surrender monkeys taking the Eurostar, going to France to eat their brie?

The answer to that is that these people would fly instead. They're not going to not make the trip. And if the UK (and indeed hence France and Belgium too for that matter) want to get people out of planes and into trains, this issue matters.

/ends