Eurostar > Reviews > It beats flying ...

Author's product rating:   

Frequency of trains	Good
Reliability of trains	Mostly on time
Comfort of trains	Comfortable
On-board facilities	Satisfactory

Advantages:	fast, frequent, comfortable
Disadvantages:	not so cheap  .  .  .  .

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

I’ve travelled on Eurostar several times now, to Paris, Brussels and, more recently, Lille. For anyone who lives in or near London, any other form of car-free transport to these places is pointless – the only problem is that it now takes me almost as long to reach London as it does to get from London to Lille!

The advantages are that you get airline speed with less hassle …. and for those who claim that it doesn’t take 3 hours to get to Paris by plane, we’re talking city-centre to city-centre including check-in!
You can also get some good deals if you look carefully and even if you don’t, the option to ‘turn up and go’ still isn’t a reality by air.

The disadvantages? Well, the trains are now starting to look a bit tatty, the speed restrictions this side of the channel make the journey a little more tedious (London-Ashford in an hour is hardly high-speed!) and Waterloo isn’t the best London terminal to reach for most people travelling from outside London. Oh, and what happened to the trolley service?!!

One gripe from this last trip is that the stations in the Capitals are like airports and once checked-in you have the ’usual’ facilities on offer. At Lille, on the other hand, the barriers stayed firmly shut until 30 minutes before train time…. which allowed just enough time to check-in and get to the right part of the platform. The waiting room seems to be at the arrivals end of the station (logic?) and the station is just that. I can’t say about Ashford, but I guess the story will be much the same.

But if you haven’t yet tried it, you should. Once you’re on the other side of the channel you can see how rail travel should be, smooth, fast and comfortable …… so smooth that you don’t realise how fast you’re going until you see the cars on the motorway and it looks like they’re travelling at 30 mph!