The Channel Tunnel wants to attract companies to serve new destinations in Europe

“The Channel Tunnel railway is grossly underutilized”: Getlink chief executive, infrastructure manager Yann Leriche on Thursday promised a doubling of connections between London and the continent within 10 years , with potential new cities served. Cologne, Frankfurt, Geneva, Zurich... The company's boss has put on the table a whole series of new possible destinations for operators who would like to get started.

Getlink claims to have halved the time to launch a line passing through the tunnel thanks to “the standardization of tunnel standards” and “integration of standards with manufacturers into their standard rolling stock offering”. In summary, it is possible to buy a train from a catalog capable of running almost directly in the tunnel.

In 1994 when the infrastructure opened, only two connections were possible: London-Paris and London-Brussels. A new London-Amsterdam line was then opened in 2020. It took ten years to come to fruition, between the idea of ​​launching it and the first trip. “It’s too long,” insisted Yann Leriche.

“Now you can get started, buy the train, and five years later you are running,” said Yann Leriche on the occasion of an event organized for the 30th anniversary of the Channel Tunnel, work on which ended on December 10, 1993. Thanks to this shortening of deadlines, “we will have a doubling of direct connections between London and European capitals within ten years,” he wants to believe.

For 30 years, only one company - Eurostar - has provided passenger transport between the continent and England, at a price often considered prohibitive, particularly compared to plane or ferry. Two companies have recently announced their intention to launch new routes: Evolyn and the Dutch Heuro. For the moment, no train order has been formalized, making the possibility of seeing a competing offer to the Eurostar emerge in the years to come still hypothetical.

Already in 2013, Deutsche Bahn rolled one of its ICEs through the Channel Tunnel. At the time, the historic German railway operator planned to offer its first trips in 2016. The project never came to fruition. But this time, for the connections to Cologne or Frankfurt “all the market studies are carried out and the studies of the necessary station developments too. It remains for an operator to decide to go there, the paths have even been prepared,” promised Yann Leriche.