paddington
Member
- Joined
- 19 Feb 2013
- Messages
- 964
I tried this out for the first time last week, it was a poor experience. Immigration slowness at St Pancras, drunk passengers on a weekday morning, rude train staff (making racist comments about the drunk passengers), wailing babies, poor wifi speed and GPS signals blocked by the window material. The toilets ran out of tissues.
For Brussels the Eurostar remains my preferred option, but I don't think I will repeat the experience to Amsterdam unless there is a very good sale in the Premier classes. One positive was that the train ran exactly to its scheduled 3h41m, but with this sort of timing I still find flights to be more convenient as I can get to LCY/LGW more quickly/cheaply than St Pancras, and getting to my usual destinations from Schiphol takes just as long as from Amsterdam Centraal. Meanwhile BRU is only served from LHR (apart from the thrice-weekly RwandAir addon) and I usually want to end up near Brussels Central station rather than Zaventem so flights are very unattractive.
The barcode of my PDF ticket, stored on my phone, opened the barriers at Centraal station in both directions without limit.
For Brussels the Eurostar remains my preferred option, but I don't think I will repeat the experience to Amsterdam unless there is a very good sale in the Premier classes. One positive was that the train ran exactly to its scheduled 3h41m, but with this sort of timing I still find flights to be more convenient as I can get to LCY/LGW more quickly/cheaply than St Pancras, and getting to my usual destinations from Schiphol takes just as long as from Amsterdam Centraal. Meanwhile BRU is only served from LHR (apart from the thrice-weekly RwandAir addon) and I usually want to end up near Brussels Central station rather than Zaventem so flights are very unattractive.
The barcode of my PDF ticket, stored on my phone, opened the barriers at Centraal station in both directions without limit.