Meanwhile, Eurostar is using around 16,000 paths per year, rather than the 19,500 it used before the pandemic. That leaves an overall gap of around 5,000 paths, which is 6.5% of the pre-pandemic total.
So, if HS1 has done what it can to cut and control costs, what of the other option? What of expanding its St Pancras facilities so that there’s space for more border officers to deal with sufficient passengers to fill Eurostar’s trains?
It’s something Crowther’s team was looking at before the pandemic, when the international market was growing at 3.5% a year and HS1 was keen to add more destinations such as Geneva and Frankfurt.
“Pre-COVID, we did what we call SPICE work, which was St Pancras International Capacity Enhancement. We completed something we call Baby Spice, because we already had poor customer experience on high days and holidays when we were queuing people out of the station.
“The queues you get today, we used to get on high days and holidays. We created additional departure capability in the arrivals lounge in the arrivals area. So, there’s an additional queuing area in there that we used to trigger because Eurostar knew how many people had booked onto trains, and we could have the sensible conversation with Borders and PAF and say we need additional resources so we can manage the customer experience and keep them off the station.
“That was Stage 1 of our capacity enhancement. The bigger change we were looking at was how we could flip arrivals and departures. One of the schemes we had was looking at arrivals on the top deck, so a little bit like how they do it at Gare du Nord where you just walk to the end of the platform and depart…”
Through that great glass screen that looks so inviting, suggests RailReview?
“Yes, before you then go down the chicane. That then means the arrivals bit downstairs could be reallocated to departures so you could have more space, more lounge so you expanded the restricted zone.
“We’d have to give up some of the retail units - for example, where the Betjeman Arms is. Things like that, because that’s where you’d put your Borders people. So, you’d have to reconfigure the top part of the station. Everything that’s in arrivals at the moment you would need to move upstairs.”
So, not quite as simple as putting a door in the glass screen?
“No, it if was that simple, we’d have done it.”
The price tag of this work was £50m. It’s now likely to be a good deal more, given inflation generally and construction inflation in particular. Not something that can be put on an open access operator that is already having to cope with higher debts and their associated costs.
Put simply, it will cost money to solve the space problem, and that will incur higher charges. And, despite the work on HS1 operating and maintenance costs, it must still charge for future renewals. This produces a bottom line that HS1 is an expensive asset, and that expense is being spread more thickly onto fewer trains and passengers. This has all the hallmarks of a downwards spiral.
How can HS1 square these circles?
“I can’t. I really can’t,” replies Crowther.
“These are things that are happening outside of my control, outside of the railway’s control. It’s a combination of policy, physical interventions - it’s symptomatic of outputs coming in the system now that were just not foreseen. It’s nobody’s fault. It’s a little bit, OK, these are the challenges we’re facing at the moment, we’re not sat on our hands, we’re trying to fix it, and everyone you talk to goes ‘My God, that’s a real issue, isn’t it’?
“The further you go into it, the harder it is to unlock. We’re trying to do what we can, control the stuff that’s within our gift - putting resources into queue management, get more resources in to protect the customer experience, how we can use digitisation so that people do stuff that reduces cost. But the bottom line is that we’re facing a situation where we can’t grow.
“And if I can’t grow against a baseline that is lower than where we were pre-pandemic, that then starts to throw question marks over the many socio-economic benefits that high-speed brought.”
That’s the rub. The border controls that are coming with Brexit look almost certain to stop Eurostar recovering even to its pre-pandemic passenger numbers, let alone growing. Let that sink in…
Crowther continues: “We’re starting to talk about the opportunity that’s lost because of these geo-political challenges that we’re now facing. They need geo-political solutions. That’s not me moaning, it’s just where we are.
“I can work on the domestic side of things. We can restructure to lean into the leisure market of things. We can be agile around that.
“But on the international side, it’s been a strategic objective of HS1 for some time to get a second international operator to get more destinations. If I’ve got one operator at the moment, and growth is pretty flat because my big constraint is terminal capacity because of how we process our borders…”
Because there’s no space?
“Yeah. So, a geo-political problem which needs a geo-political solution. I think there will be one, but it’s getting stakeholders within the system to want to be able to fix the system because it affects economies, be it the economy of London, Paris, Brussels or Amsterdam, and then spills over into country economies.
“High-speed rail is being put forward as a sustainable choice, a sustainable transport mode, and I’m looking at a mode that’s going to become less sustainable because the elements needed to support it just aren’t there.”
The opportunity lost becomes very apparent when you hear Eurostar Chief Commercial Officer Francois Le Doze talk about Amsterdam.
He tells RailReview: “Our London-Netherlands route presents an exciting growth opportunity. With just three services a day, in July this year we became the third-largest operator on this route. In September, we introduced a fourth return service, and given the scale of the air market and increasing consideration of sustainable travel, we see huge potential.”
For this potential to translate into reality, you need what Le Doze describes as a “fluid border”.
But with tighter and lengthier checks coming next spring, the border will become more solid than it’s ever been. That doesn’t bode well for Eurostar or High Speed 1. ■
