Dutch start-up proposes cross-channel service to compete with Eurostar.

[AlbertBeale]

Have you seen how busy the NLL already is and how built up it is along its whole route (a big chunk of which is prime London real estate - a one bed ex-Council flat goes for £500k in much of Islington or Camden for example). Your last para, which would likely mean destroying busy successful local services (the original London Overground line) to accommodate long distance travel, has in my view absolutely no chance of flying.

Disclosure: l live adjacent to the NLL and would be one of those considering taking active civil disobedience if it was tried.

Yes - as also a local (working in the block next to KX station for decades), I wasn't suggesting that sending services on from HS1 round the NLL to OOC was a good idea - just that it was perhaps not as bad an idea as tunneling from HS1 to OOC, as had been suggested. In practice, either seems a non-starter. Unfortunately, most of the imaginative ideas for increasing terminal capacity seem to have pretty major downsides!

The only redeeming feature of using the NLL to OOC is that by giving travelers to/from mainland Europe a useful set of interconnections (and different ones from those at St P) at OOC, and hence saving interchange hassle in central London, passengers might put up with the extra half an hour or more crawling round the NLL behind an Overground service! If international services simply used the existing tracks, such a plan surely needn't really involve demolition?

And NLL freight? Send it along Crossrail...

(PS - welcome to the "civil disobedience community".)

Why is building on viaducts and a terminus at a higher level never thought of as a reasonable option? There is plenty of space to build another level on top of the domestic tracks at St Pancras that could be used to accommodate "half trains".

There's a one-word answer to the idea of having platforms above the MML platforms at StP which link to the HS1 tunnels ... "gradient".

 

[ShadowKnight]

Or Eurostar takes the MML platforms and move the MML terminus elsewhere, not sure where but somewhere

 

[AlbertBeale]

Or Eurostar takes the MML platforms and move the MML terminus elsewhere, not sure where but somewhere

The MML platforms would need doubling in length - it northwards, maybe no room to take the curve needed. If back into the train shed ... well... no more champagne bar etc!

And yes - where would MML trains go? They're cramped enough already! They could do with taking over the champagne bar themselves...

 

[nwales58]

We all know it is simple:

IF the whole St Pancras station box is used as a transport interchange, most of the capacity problems can be solved quite easily.

AS this is Britain, the only solution is to get someone to build another shopping centre or office block and hope to get a sub-optimal, constrained, transport hub as a side benefit.

Look at Wien Hbf (done), Madrid Chamartin (coming soon) or any of the dozens of recent Chinese major city stations and despair.

 

[Trainbike46]

The problem for St Pancras isn't platform capacity, it is capacity to get people through security, and in the waiting room for those platforms. This is fortunate, as it is easier to resolve.

One thing that has already been done is create 2 extra security lanes and an extra waiting room by reducing the size of the arrivals area, which was possible by removing the disney arrivals that required passport checks on arrival - these get used at the busiest times, and eurostar now no longer caps the number of seats sold on a train below it's capacity

Another thing that should be considered is closing all the shops that are adjacent to the existing waiting room and security area, and using that space for another 2 lanes and a bigger waiting room

Combined with the border checks hopefully going quicker when ETIAS and EES are up and running and have bedded in (after a period of increased processing times in all likelihood), capacity should increase in the medium term.

I'd hope the service gets increased to use that extra capacity, whether it be by eurostar or by one of the many companies that have spoken about launching competing services

 

[30907]

There's a one-word answer to the idea of having platforms above the MML platforms at StP which link to the HS1 tunnels ... "gradient".

A slightly longer one: Grade 1 listing.
I suppose you could take over the Grand Terrace and create an arrivals facility in the Betjeman Arms/Carluccios, but I'm not sure how passengers would disperse from there. (You could get rid of the giant statue aka Meeting Place too... beginning to think this is a good idea )