Eurostar's inaugural journey from St Pancras
22 November 2007 :: Green travel by Laura Burgess
I know St Pancras Station well. Very well in fact. The last seven years that I’ve been living in Nottingham I have passed through an evolving St Pancras Station countless times. And each time something new had been added or a walkway had been shifted to allow for building works to take place. So I learnt to give myself a few extra minutes to navigate my way to the platform through what was clearly an impressive reconstruction process with minimum fuss for passengers to and from the Midlands. After several years of spending those extra few minutes in St Pancras Station, I unknowingly began to accumulate images in my mind of the new station as it transformed into St Pancras International. Overhead the mighty roof opened up and I remember seeing one day a pair of legs dangling from the top of the arch. Gradually the brickwork of the walls was uncovered and a glimpse of the old station came through. On one occasion, the old waiting room was nowhere to be seen and the makeshift bar that was always smoky and rammed full of travellers disappeared overnight. Even the walk to the toilets seemed to change as regularly as the train operators did.
So after seven years of transitioning through the grand old station, the first glimpse of a Eurostar train in the far distant platform stopped me in my tracks. It was months before launch, but it looked like it was just waiting, poised for the moment that it could take its maiden voyage along the new high speed track to the tunnel and beyond. If you had told me back then that I’d be on that very same train out of London to Paris on the day that the big blue clock in the foyer finally reached 00:00:00, I wouldn’t have believed you. But somebody, somewhere must have sensed my anticipation and sent me a golden ticket to be on the first train to leave St Pancras at 11.03 am on 14 November 2007.
I arrived into St Pancras early on that morning, through the new walkway from the underground. Although the redevelopment of the station had been slowly uncovered over several years, the genius of the architect was revealed when the final piece of the jigsaw was slotted into place and at the very last moment the central thoroughfare opened up to make way for St Pancras’ international passengers. It was a moment that I had hoped would reflect a new belief in the railways and one that would recognise the efforts and dreams of John Betjeman and others like him. I passed by his statue which will serve as a reminder of his part in saving St Pancras from demolition in the 1960s. And in the new year, when I have my first pint in St Pancras’ new pub, the Betjeman Arms, I’ll raise a toast to his faith in the railway when everyone around him thought that the road and individualised transport was the way to go.
I suppose I should say that I was on the Eurostar, I found out later, because of my work in encouraging travellers to go green. Of course, the Eurostar is infinitely more green than flying to Europe. The statistics we were told on the train would certainly back that up. For example, travelling by Eurostar generates 10 times less carbon emissions than flying. But I think it goes beyond that, and travelling by Eurostar is in actual fact far easier and much more reliable than flying. So Betjamen’s dreams of a new age of rail travel may well be realised.
