Agh always struggled to get the clocks right in my head, despite a year living over on 'the other side' as it were. Even so, the point remains that an late afternoon/early evening train from London and change to a night train in Brussels is a very viable plan.If you got a 2100 departure from St P to Brussels, you‘d miss the 2330 sleeper from Brussels by at least half an hour
You've forgotten the time zone difference. It would be more like 7pm departure from London for a 10:30-11pm sleeper. Including the check in time and transfer across London, you'd have to arrive at your chosen terminal by 5pm, at which point you couldn't leave after your office job, and it saves much less time.
I've never had a problem with less than an hour's checkin at St Pancras (and that's in Standard), and 3 of the 4 most likely terminals for a London arrival are 10, 5, and 3 minutes walk from St Pancras Ticket Checks. (Paddington is the missing Long-Distance Terminal, which takes a bit longer to get to St P via XR/TL or Circle).
Alternatively, night trains heading south and east might be concentrated at Paris Est station for easy connections from Eurostar (including former Thalys routes from Benelux and N Germany); it's a five-minute walk from Nord. With a new chord from the LGV Est to the Interconnexion near Annet sur Marne, about 17km might be saved over the journey out of Nord.
Also the 92s are getting rather long in the tooth now and are a complex, dated design. While I doubt anyone would consider building new locos especially for UK-continent sleepers, a more modern state-of-the-art continental loco hired from a general purpose pool might be used as far as St Pancras, assuming it had all the relevant systems. A pair of modern 4 axle locos would be a good match for a 92. The SNCF BB 22200 locos were operated in pairs on freight between France and Dollands Moor ISTR. That satisfied tunnel safety regs requiring two independent traction systems, each able to get a train out of the tunnel in event of failure of the other. A single 92 met the same requirement by incorporating two complete traction systems onboard within separate compartments of the same bodyshell.
I'm sure it's been answered before, but: is there any reason why all immigration facilities, both UK and Schengen, cannot be done at London (in both directions), incidentally? It would centralise everything and if someone had a problem entering the UK, or was trying to flee the law in France, they could always be put on the next train back to Paris.
UK rules impose juxtaposed controls AFAIK, and having the controls at the end of the journey make any advantage to travelling by train irrelevant (having border controls at the beginning of the journey is very appealing, which is why quite a few people will purposefuly connect in Dublin for the US Preclearance even though it is quite a roundabout way)
Politics, essentially. The Disneyland trains used to check on arrival in London AIUI so it can (Cloud) be done, however that was justified on the basis these trains were overwhelmingly British families returning from home and so the risk of a person looking to enter the UK when they shouldn't or claim asylum was minimal.
An excellent idea, if East can cope, though it would add a bit to journeys south and south-west. Daresay it will displease Parisians who have got used to Austerlitz
Night trains don't use the LGVs so you wouldn't need that - Grande Ceinture to Villeneuve yard gets you onto the PLM and PO which between them serve any likely sleeper destination.
I don't think STP could cope with a full check - and there's also Tunnel security (which won't go away, much as we might wish), otherwise one could move the Lille shuffle to Ashford or Ebbsfleet
As we've seen from people arriving in the UK in other ways, it's actually quite hard to remove someone once they've entered the UK. e.g. people destroying their documentation so the country that they came from won't accept them either. Juxtaposed border control alleviates those issues.
It really isn‘t. Who is paying for it? Passengers or taxpayers?
Ultimately this links to enabling carbon saving long distance travel. Stating the obvious: these kinds of projects take years to develop and implement. And by then global temperature rises and systems of tracking individuals air travel seem highly likely.
That is interesting. Air travel has become more efficient with time and investment. Rail would too given time and investment. Still I can’t believe that electrically powered trains (are they mostly?) are as bad for the environment. Throwing out tonnes of fuel into the atmosphere is commonly understood to be hugely damaging.
It doesn't. Travelling on day trains does because they are more efficient use of the energy required.
The problem with sleeper trains is the loading gauge makes it very difficult to pack in enough passengers.
Which can be far more efficiently achieved with a day train carrying 800 passengers than a night train carrying 400.
In previous threads regarding the Caledonian Sleeper, it was calculated that flying used less carbon per passenger for London to Inverness or Aberdeen. Though that does involve a diesel locomotive for part of the journey.
Does it? And why?
This is the trap into which railway enthusiasts always fall. Not everybody lives or works close to a central railway station, in fact most people don't.
The government already knows exactly which plane you've ever crossed the border on, which is nearly all of them for all of us. The carriers and data brokers could also do this.
But Stevenson came before the Wright brothers, so I'm not sure what you mean here.
Being able to travel overnight is only an advantage if people want to travel overnight. That's not as large a market as people who prefer to sleep in a nicer bed.
Not all stations are particularly central, tbh.
