London St. Pancras Highspeed has agreed to work with Eurotunnel on a strategic partnership to boost high-speed rail connectivity between the UK and Europe.
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London St. Pancras Highspeed and Eurotunnel have announced a landmark partnership to accelerate the growth of cross-Channel high-speed rail, marking a pivotal step towards transforming sustainable and efficient international travel between the UK and Europe.
The UK’s only high-speed rail infrastructure operator, London St. Pancras Highspeed, and Eurotunnel, owned by Paris based company Getlink, share a commitment to expand rail connectivity on both sides of the English Channel.
Through this strategic growth partnership, both parties will cooperate more closely to lay the foundations for increased cross-Channel rail traffic, with the aim of creating new routes and destinations along the line.
The parties have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) which outlines a variety of important steps designed to deepen collaboration on innovation and engineering initiatives.
These include exploring opportunities to shorten journey times, improve timetable coordination, and align more closely on growth strategies, as well as working together to introduce more trains each hour for international services in each direction.
These enhancements will make rail travel faster, more efficient and widely available – aiming to make rail travel the preferred transport option to the continent.
The MoU follows the announcement of a new study by London St. Pancras Highspeed which highlights the potential to increase current international passenger capacity in St. Pancras up to nearly 5,000 per hour in a bid to unlock the untapped potential of the iconic London station and high-speed line.
Getlink have said that direct services could serve Frankfurt and Cologne as well as Geneva and Zurich. Eventually services could reach as far as Milan.
If everything goes as planned, the new services probably wouldn’t begin until at least 2030. Potential operators would need time to acquire trains and get permission to operate on both sides of the channel.
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