Historical Eurostar Query

[R848]

Was wondering if someone could answer a few questions on the following article mentioning a proposed second terminus at King's Cross alongside Waterloo as the Channel Tunnel was being planned?

1) Is it known what the three other stations considered on shortlist for the second station were?

2) Additionally how did they plan on having Eurostar trains reach Newcastle and Edinburgh, etc or was this basically a precursor to High Speed 1, in that the routes to the rest of the UK north of London basically bypassed King's Cross / St Pancras (unless the proposed station at King's Cross was not in fact a terminus but itself a stop linking the continent to the rest of the UK)?

https://londonist.com/london/transport/kings-cross-station-eurostar-st-pancras

 

[gazthomas]

On point 2, yes, this was a precursor to HS1, using the shorter "Regional Eurostars" running on classic 750V DC third rail/25KV AC overhead. I guess they would have gone via Kensington Olympia

 

[Ianno87]

There was a brief idea of using Eurostars through what is now the Thameslink core, too, to access King's Cross.

On point 2, yes, this was a precursor to HS1, using the shorter "Regional Eurostars" running on classic 750V DC third rail/25KV AC overhead. I guess they would have gone via Kensington Olympia

Correct, pre any HS1/CTRL. Olympia being the nominal "customs" location (being much quieter train-wise then)

 

[R848]

I see. Aside from King's Cross and Kensington Olympia, would it be accurate to say the other two stations on the shortlist were St Pancras and Stratford International (unless the latter two appeared later)? If not is it known what the other two stations were?

Is it also known whether the route via Kensington Olympia would have potentially butterflied away the Overground West London Line as well as the National Rail West London Route?

Am assuming there were a number of drawbacks to using Eurostars through the Thameslink core, despite the apparent appeal of using it to travel to both the continent as well as other parts of the UK.

Update - Managed to find out the four options were King's Cross Low Level, St Pancras, White City (as opposed to Kensington Olympia) and Stratford via on page 87 of following PDF. Which also includes other rejected alternatives such as London Bridge, Smithfield via Bishopsgate as well as a number routes to Euston either via Victoria, London Bridge or Stratford. - http://www.omegacentre.bartlett.ucl.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/UK_CTRL_PROFILE.pdf

Another map on page 88 also appear to show a southward approach to King's Cross Low Level (?) via Warwick Gardens / Peckham, yet why limit themselves to a terminus at King's Cross when they could travel straight to Newcastle, Edinburgh, etc? The same question also applies to the rejected southward approach to Euston via Victoria or London Bridge on page 87.

That is unless there was indeed scope in the project for such an upgrade to routes north of London at a later date.

 

[PeterC]

I thought that the original concept of regional Eurostar was based on having on-train passport checks and, I would imagine, rather less in the way of security.

 

[RLBH]

Another map on page 88 also appear to show a southward approach to King's Cross Low Level (?) via Warwick Gardens / Peckham, yet why limit themselves to a terminus at King's Cross when they could travel straight to Newcastle, Edinburgh, etc? The same question also applies to the rejected southward approach to Euston via Victoria or London Bridge on page 87.

That is unless there was indeed scope in the project for such an upgrade to routes north of London at a later date.

I believe that the intention was that Kings Cross Low Level would be a through station with links to the main lines north. Figure 31 on Page 89 of the UCL document you linked shows the station extending north-westwards - presumably climbing towards the North London Line with a junction in the Kentish Town area allowing access to the West Coast and East Coast routes.

I think there may also have been an idea to direct Thameslink services through the new low-level station, though I'm not 100% sure.

 

[R848]

I believe that the intention was that Kings Cross Low Level would be a through station with links to the main lines north. Figure 31 on Page 89 of the UCL document you linked shows the station extending north-westwards - presumably climbing towards the North London Line with a junction in the Kentish Town area allowing access to the West Coast and East Coast routes.

I think there may also have been an idea to direct Thameslink services through the new low-level station, though I'm not 100% sure.

Would Eurostar running through King's Cross Low Level onto the West Coast and East Coast routes have conflicted too much with Thameslink or could it have worked without negatively affecting both?

Where would that have left the existing Thameslink stops at St Pancras and King's Cross, if it would have instead been directed to the low level station?

 

[Bald Rick]

Yes the plan was an all new low level station roughly underneath where the new Kings Cross concourse is now, fed from the south from either a new tunnel all the way from South London, or the Thameslink tunnel (the latter very quickly dismissed). Goign north splitting to the ECML, MML and WCML. However the engineering was horrendously difficult. Hence it was dropped.

 

[randyrippley]

I don't think Eurostar was ever envisaged to run up the WCML............my memory is that at the time all the press reports were of Eurostar on the ECML only due to the higher speed there, with the Nightstar sleepers using the WCML. As to the routing round London, all the press attention was West London / North London lines with Olympia as the London stop - nothing about Euston or Kings Cross
As for White City, I thought that was the initial preference over Waterloo

 

[randyrippley]

I thought that the original concept of regional Eurostar was based on having on-train passport checks and, I would imagine, rather less in the way of security.

Locally there was talk of plans for platform 3 at Lancaster to be converted into a secure area for the Nightstar service - it had to be 3 as the others weren't long enough. Plans were for pre-boarding checks

 

[Busaholic]

Last week I attended the funeral of Ashley Barker, OBE, a man I'd known for getting on for thirty years. I knew him through supplying books, mostly of an architectural nature, to him. He was a very private man, but I'd always known that he'd been the GLC's head of historic buildings, and had been on the verge of retiring at the time the GLC got wound up, though he was persuaded to take on a similar role with English Heritage which he later resigned from on a point of principle.

The relevance to this thread was what he told me in the one prolonged conversation we ever had, when he was very excited about the appearance of a long-awaited volume in the Survey of London series on the St Marylebone area. Somehow we got round to the subject of railway termini in the northern part of central London and he told me of his appearances over, iirc, a ten year period before a Parliamentary sub-committee that was dealing with HS1 (not known by that name then, of course) and, in particular, the vexed question of how the cross-Channel trains were going to access the railway routes to Scotland and the Midlands/North of England. I regret I cannot remember all the detail he gave me, even though it was merely a synopsis, but I'm pretty sure he mentioned an east-west tunnel closely parallel to the Euston Road that would definitely have connected with the WCML, possibly around the Primrose Hill area. There was talk of providing a station in this central tunnel too, but I can't remember how he said that ended. I do know he said he kept a mass of papers from this time in his capacious home and I'm pretty certain he signed off by saying that the powers for this tunnelling were eventually granted, with no date for when they'd be enacted but, in his opinion, they could in theory be resurrected without too much further ado if there was a mind to, which seemed to excite him, possibly because he was the only person who any longer knew this.

 

[R848]

Of the other suggested possibilities on page 87. Am intrigued by the shortlisted King's Cross Low Level route that diverges from Thameslink via possibly a new tunnel past London Bridge as well as the rejected Euston routes via either London Bridge (through Aldwych / Temple) and Victoria, the latter noticeably resembling the North-South proposals such as the 1980 Cross-London rail-link and the 1989 North-South Crossrail. Since both appear to be conceived as through stations instead of terminus.

 

[Ianno87]

I don't think Eurostar was ever envisaged to run up the WCML............my memory is that at the time all the press reports were of Eurostar on the ECML only due to the higher speed there, with the Nightstar sleepers using the WCML. As to the routing round London, all the press attention was West London / North London lines with Olympia as the London stop - nothing about Euston or Kings Cross
As for White City, I thought that was the initial preference over Waterloo

No, there were two trains per day each way planned to/from Manchester. One via Birmingham, the other via the Trent Valley.

Depot built at Longsight, and extensive test running dun in the mid-late 90s, and provisional times included in the National Rail Timetable.

 

[coppercapped]

I don't think Eurostar was ever envisaged to run up the WCML............my memory is that at the time all the press reports were of Eurostar on the ECML only due to the higher speed there, with the Nightstar sleepers using the WCML. As to the routing round London, all the press attention was West London / North London lines with Olympia as the London stop - nothing about Euston or Kings Cross
As for White City, I thought that was the initial preference over Waterloo

The White City proposal was for the abandoned 1970s attempt at building the Channel Tunnel. This link takes you to the Hansard report on the 1974 debate in the House of Lords. It's much too long to quote from but it shows the strength of feeling about routing the Channel Tunnel trains at high speed through the south London suburbs; this was one of the reasons that the Arup proposal for the more northerly routing of the rail link from the subsequently completed tunnel to St. Pancras was chosen.
If I recall correctly (I can't get up into the attic as I'm abroad at the moment!) one of the original proposals was for one terminus in south London and another in the Kings Cross / Euston area to better serve the south of London and north of London markets. When the costs of tunnelling under south London to Waterloo became apparent and with the much lower than anticipated traffic it became clear that running two separate terminals would not be economic and as a result the Government plumped for one terminal at St. Pancras. There was also the anticipated benefit that an international station at Stratford would help regenerate the Docklands - so the station was built but, as we all know, no international trains have ever stopped at it.