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The other price is €35 for a Eurostar reservation with an Interrail ticket. A 4 day Interrail ticket is €283 for an adult.
At the moment €35 Eurostar reservations are available on November 24th from London to Paris on all the trains. On Tuesday 20th, they are available on the 11.31, 12.01, 12.31, 13.31, 14.31, 15.31, 16.31, 17.31, 18.01, 19.01 and 20.01.
€318 is ~ £268, for which you get travel to St Pancras, the Eurostar ticket, and 4 days travel around Europe. For some of those trains a normal Eurostar ticket on its own would be £228.
The problem with current Eurostar pricing is that you only get them by booking quite far ahead. If you want to travel more spontaneously they become much more expensive.
Here are current prices for this coming Tuesday, standard singles ranging from £180 to £264.
Personally I'd trade some somewhat higher advance-booking fares for some somewhat lower near-term ones. I don't pretend to understand exactly how the economics of this work. But this current pricing strategy is something I might hope competitors would take aim at. Because Eurostar's ability to determine the amount of availability each day will be removed.
St Pancras to Paris is approximately the same distance as Ashford to York. Obviously the route north of London is not high speed and there are no channel tunnel security costs.
The Anytime Single is £187.40 with £90.80 Off Peak the cheapest advance is £57. Taking your choice of next Tuesday the cheapest advance is available on one train at lunchtime. After 13.16 the cheapest price is the £187.40 anytime bar a few arrivals in York after 22.00 These are heavily subsidised fares.
I still dont see how you expect Eurostar to offer sub £100 fares except as headliners on unpopular trains without subsidy.
St Pancras to Paris is approximately the same distance as Ashford to York. Obviously the route north of London is not high speed and there are no channel tunnel security costs.
For the Channel Tunnel, Reserved Weekly Passenger train slots vary from €5,036 to €6,155 per train depending on peak/off peak and operating speed. On top of that is a €21.80 fee per passenger. And a €7,500 admin fee per contract (so potentially spread over 6 month's worth of a full timetable of trains)
For HS1, the charges are:
Investment Recovery Charge (IRC): £129.66 per minute your train is on the network. For an international passenger service this is £4,019.53 per train (in the latest Network Statement, not sure if that has been updated since the ORR had a stern word).
Additional IRC: £0.34/min, or £10.54 per international service.
Ops, Maintenance and Renewal Charge (OMRC): £2,742.49 per train
Traction electricity charge (metered)
All these numbers are from slightly different base years and there are inflation adjustments for them.
For the HS1 Stations, the cost is divided across all operators using the various facilities (e.g. SE don't pay for border control) and the metric included the relative size of facilities and the number of vehicle-departures so there's not a cost per train. Any exclusive services are charged directly to the TOC being serviced and don't have publicly available rates.
However, the annual fees for the common charges are:
2025/26 Estimates:
St pancras
Stratford
Ebbsfleet
Ashford
Qualifying Expenditure
£31m
£5.2m
£5.4m
£2.6m
Long-Term Charge
£5.8m
£1.3m
£1.5m
£0.6m
Obviously it's difficult to work out how much of the St Pancras premium is for border control, or if that's an exclusive charge.
All figures from the Getlink and LSPHS Network statements.
We can gain from the comparison because if LNER cant offer an average fare of £75 for the same distance with subsidy, no channel or customs charges and little high speed running, its pretty likely that Eurostar cant either.
We can gain from the comparison because if LNER cant offer an average fare of £75 for the same distance with subsidy, no channel or customs charges and little high speed running, its pretty likely that Eurostar cant either.
I'm not sure the two are that comparable aside from length. The Gotthard Base Tunnel was built for and is owned by SBB which is a state-owned holding company and thus has the financial backing of the state in a country that generally treats it as part of the wider rail network and by extension a crucial piece of infrastructure (which it is to be fair). Meanwhile the Channel Tunnel was funded entirely by private finance and is owned by Getlink, a company funded by investors and shareholders which by nature operates on a profit-making basis.
An Anytime Single from St Pancras to Ashford International is £49.30 and £47.20 Off Peak with none of the security costs. This receives a heavy government subsidy.
We can gain from the comparison because if LNER cant offer an average fare of £75 for the same distance with subsidy, no channel or customs charges and little high speed running, its pretty likely that Eurostar cant either.
Plenty of £75 fares available between London and York. And again, is London to York subsidised? Or does it cross-subsidise LNER's less-profitable routes?
Not that much from my experience, their services via Medway are quite well-used as a fast service from Thanet-Medway and on to London throughout the day. The Ashford services I don't use as often, however they seem to be decently used due to Southeasterns liberal use of splitting/joining at Ashford.
Not that much from my experience, their services via Medway are quite well-used as a fast service from Thanet-Medway and on to London throughout the day. The Ashford services I don't use as often, however they seem to be decently used due to Southeasterns liberal use of splitting/joining at Ashford.
Wasn't a huge portion of the capital from building the Chunnel wiped out in the insolvency crisis? Eurotunnel as was was put into bankruptcy protection.
Wasn't a huge portion of the capital from building the Chunnel wiped out in the insolvency crisis? Eurotunnel as was was put into bankruptcy protection.
The existing shareholders were massively diluted by a debt for equity swap. There was new debt issued, the 2025 accounts appear to show €5.1bn of outstanding liabilities and €279m in interest payments.
The access charges are already supervised by the ORR this side of the channel, and ORR jointly with a French counterpart for the tunnel itself.
As it happens, the marginal charges for the tunnel itself on a per passenger basis (£23 IIRC) are not that much higher than they were 30 years ago in cash terms, ie they are much cheaper in real terms. There is also a per train charge as well.
Sorry for the slow reply. I missed this in my long list of notifications!
So, essentially the operators of HS1/LGVs/Eurotunnel are suppressing further growth by setting charges so high that it disincentivises operators who are attempting to use all Channel Tunnel passenger paths with ticket prices they can fill trains at.
With the LGV section and Paris Gare du Nord, I can sort of understand the point, there's plenty of demand on domestic French routes and international traffic as far north as Lille, but I don't see the point of Getlink and London St Pancras Highspeed suppressing traffic (as I understand it, the passenger paths are ringfenced, so Getlink can't use them for extra LeShuttle services - I might be wrong).
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Possibly down to fact that they are only running a limited number of services.
I often argue that for the UK rail network we need to look at places where there's limited frequencies but could do marginally better than break even on running an extra and run that train.
The reason being, is that if one line costs £20 million to keep open and that's seeing 10 trains a day, each with 300 people (and assuming 350 days a year to make the maths easy) then each person has to pay £20.10 to keep the line open and £5 to run the trains. With a total cost of £25.10, if the average train ticket costing £23 there's a lot of subsidy needed to keep that line running (circa £2.2 million).
However, if you double the trains you are now needing to pay £7 to run the trains, however the frequency is now double and so the trains are more than twice as attractive and so even if you only see 220 people per train the cost per person has fallen to £13 so the total cost is now £20.
Only to fill the seats the average train ticket fell to £19, that station still means that there is a subsidy of £1.55 million but that's about 30% lower than it was before.
However, that doesn't factor in the fact that there's now likely to be far more economic activity due to the circa 45% extra people moving about and so are either likely to be paying more taxes (be that by being paid more and/or paying for more stuff) and so the cost to pay for that reduced subsidy is a smaller percentage of GDP.
That would even be the case if we played with the numbers so that the cash value of subsidy was the same or even (up to a point) marginally higher.
As others have highlighted, if there's a (say) 30% uplift in trains running on the infrastructure a lot of the infrastructure charges are now spread across more trains and so all the operators can maintain their profit percentages whist seeing falls in ticket prices.
Yes the above is an over simplification, as I've assumed that the variable costs of running more trains are included within the cost to run the extra trains and various other simple steps.
However, it highlights that fixed costs spread over many more people can still result in noticeably cheaper tickets.
Precisely, and more passengers using that infrastructure also improves the case for further high speed lines, if you can generate extra revenue through the per-passenger charge for infrastructure use - e.g. improving the business model for LGV Picardie etc.
It seems particularly absurd with HS1, given they only have Southeastern High Speed in addition to international services.
LGV Nord at least has the ex-Thalys services using most of it, and a lot of domestic French TGV services, in addition to Eurostar.
Although I have stayed in Dublin for 50 Euros, and there were plenty of other options around this time - must be dependent on season. Paris I agree is perennially expensive.
An Anytime Single from St Pancras to Ashford International is £49.30 and £47.20 Off Peak with none of the security costs. This receives a heavy government subsidy. Theres no advance tickets before 10.00 Mon to Sat. Ashford is about 20% of the distance between St Pancras and Paris North.
I dont like Paris much but if I have to go there with the absence of trains from Ashford I drive via L Shuttle to Calais.
Booked a week in advance the domestic TGV from Frethun to Paris North is around £65 on the peak morning around £40 off peak.
Something about a £75 St Pancras to Paris fare doesnt seem to add up.
Eurostar can depress Standard ticket prices per train with volume and high load factors (plus high premium traffic demand).
Southeastern can't do this to the same extent, and, as others have said, there will be some element of cross subsidy to less popular non-high speed services - according to https://whereyourmoneygoes.co.uk/transport/rail/southeastern/, subsidy was £3.14 per passenger in 2024-25, expected to drop below £3 per passenger in this financial year.
Now, that could mean that Southeastern High Speed receives some level of subsidy, but with the load factors of rural branch lines on the Southeastern classic network, I personally doubt it.
Same goes for LNER.
So, essentially the operators of HS1/LGVs/Eurotunnel are suppressing further growth by setting charges so high that it disincentivises operators who are attempting to use all Channel Tunnel passenger paths with ticket prices they can fill trains at.
The charges are regulated, for HS1 by the ORR, and for the tunnel by a joint ORR / French regulation body. They cannot charge what they like. In ORRs most recent determination on HS1 charges, they were reduced.
LSPH (formely HS1) have been doing everything they can to drum up new business, so to say that they are surpressing growth is complete nonsense. The fact that there are new entrants is in no small part due to that effort.
HS1 is not a cheap railway to operate or maintain, and with much of it approaching its 25th birthday there is some fairly serious spend up coming on renewals. And not before time - there was a big indicent yesterday due to a cracked rail.
The charges are regulated, for HS1 by the ORR, and for the tunnel by a joint ORR / French regulation body. They cannot charge what they like.
LSPH (formely HS1) have been doing everything they can to drum up new business, so to say that they are surpressing growth is complete nonsense. The fact that there are new entrants is in no small part due to that effort.
HS1 is not a cheap railway to operate or maintain, and with much of it approaching its 25th birthday there is some fairly serious spend up coming on renewals. And not before time - there was a big indicent yesterday due to a cracked rail.
I wasn't aware of that but I'm fairly sure I read a while ago that Getlink was putting a fair bit of effort into attracting new passenger train business through their tunnel too.
I think there was some suggestion of a "budget" option which would avoid the high speed lines in France but that doesn't seem to be the way things are going.
I don't understand how there can be that much more capacity in the tunnel when it feels like almost every journey we either catch up to a shuttle in front of the control centre sends us a text saying please do 140kmh, or often, 120kmh..? Do Le shuttle have lower speed limits than Eurostar?
I don't understand how there can be that much more capacity in the tunnel when it feels like almost every journey we either catch up to a shuttle in front of the control centre sends us a text saying please do 140kmh, or often, 120kmh..? Do Le shuttle have lower speed limits than Eurostar?
Although the class 9s are capable of 160kph, they operate at 140kph through the tunnel, according to the Le Shuttle Website. Although the getlink website says the shuttles run at 120kph and Eurostar at 140kph so public information is a bit unclear. And obviously they're coming from a stand, although the gradients in the tunnel presumably help them get up to speed reasonably quickly.
