It's pretty easy to find recent videos of 92s running on HS1, so whatever the signalling system is, there are 92s with it.
As others have said it loses money because of railway economics. It serves little number of passengers across a large distance of rail, with too many expenses to maintain it by virtue of how it operates geographically and operationally in resources it needs.
And it has almost all the overheads (in some respects perhaps even more) of a full scale long distance operator, but only one train a day on each route.
To run on HS1 itself and on the channel tunn needs only TVM, the French high-speed cab-signalling system.
I imagine they would probably need to to make it feasible. Preston you have what I believe are the former postal platforms to the west which are isolated for border controls or Crewe could either isolate p12, or possibly have the space to add in a p13 for the International sleepers. Not sure if there's anywhere suitable nearer to Birmingham too. Biggest issue I see is your have to build a separate international terminal at every station it stops at for 1 train a night.
There's AWS/TPWS and TVM interface at Barking, Ebbsfleet, Ashford International and Dollands Moor/ Sand gate. Also Fawkenham Junction (nowOOU).
In fairness the existence of the services was kept quite secret, and the length of time they took to crawl round to Waterloo was something else. However the idea sets you down a line of thinking that helps you realise what a doomed idea this is.
You need to modify the Mk5s with some sort of retractable steps or modify a platform at St Pancras. The gap and height difference between UIC gauge and British is too large for passenger use. When the 395s used Stratfords international platforms for the Olympics temporary wooden platforms were placed on top over the sides.
Adding in the coach market will make the size difference even bigger.
I don’t think that’s relevant to direct trains or sleepers. There have been occasions I would have made use of direct Eurostar services from Edinburgh or Glasgow, but if I’m taking a train to a London terminus, I’d want to get off and break the journey at least a bit, not just shuffle over the platform to another train with no option to leave the station!
30 years ago, when Eurostar was far slower and you'd still need to change trains anyway.
Eurostar was also in its infancy and had a tiny market share. Now it is something like 89% of London-Paris traffic. Low cost airlines can't compete against HSR on routes under 4 hours.
In the context of a sleeper, it would be a very long train if it was anything more!
You wouldn't want a four hour sleeper train, of course. Needs to be at least eight hours to be worthwhile. The Lowlander takes seven hours to get to Watford Junction from Glasgow. Three hours more to Paris? Assuming that it were to depart Glasgow around 22:30 (it would supplement the existing train, not replace it) then that means Watford Junction at 05:30 and Paris at 08:30 or so.
The final straw (and I've had this from someone then at Eurostar who was involved with testing both Nightstar and the NoL sets before the plug was pulled - they were weeks away from opening bookings) was the SNCB loco issues. The difference between single and double heading was enough to push it over the edge - the retrenchment of sleeper services in Europe came later - airline deregulation had barely been written into law when Nightstar was abandoned.
Watford Junction to Paris North via the North London Line & HS1 is 324 miles.
dont think you even need 300km/h, in theory a 250km/h Stadler SMILE made too UK specs could work for way less
