Eurostar trains to Amsterdam and Rotterdam to be suspended for up to 11 months

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• MQ says:

  4 Jun4 June 07:13

  What a joke. It took decades to get this line up and running and now its going down again. The journey from Rotterdam to London is horrible. A 20-30 min stop in brussels followed by another 20 mins in Lille. Why does Eurostar operate a high speed train with these long stops?

  In Rotterdam the area after check in is a long corridor, extremely over crowded with almost no space to sit. Just a mess.

  • The Streets says:

    4 Jun4 June 08:38

    I recently did the return leg from Rotterdam and the stop duration was closer to 5 mins. There was a passenger asking the train stewardess if she could pop out for a smoke in Brussels and the reply was we’re there for 5 mins and if the train goes, it goes. I loved the whole journey experience.. except for the bit in Rotterdam where you pass passport control only to realise the lounge was before you enter Eurostar building! Better signage would have helped

  • Alex says:

    5 Jun5 June 02:12

    Why would you take the train from Rotterdam? There are quite a few flights LCY-RTM. RTM is very convenient, relatively easy to access from The Hague and Rotterdam, small airport, never waited very long at security.

    • patrick C says:

      5 Jun5 June 12:28

      Some people may prefer a slightly less environmentally destructive journey…

    • B says:

      7 Jun7 June 09:17

      Not everyone is footloose. People in wheelchairs, larger groups, families with small children, people who don’t want to be corralled, etc might prefer a train. A choice of options is good.

• Alan Gavurin says:

  4 Jun4 June 08:13

  Another Brexit dividend

  • mradey says:

    4 Jun4 June 08:17

    Yawn……..

  • Rich says:

    4 Jun4 June 08:28

    It’s not only a yawn mradey, it’s factually incorrect and lazy. Alan must surely know as a frequent traveller that the UK and Ireland never joined Schengen, passport checks and passenger / baggage screening were always part of the process, EU or no EU membership.

    • Henk says:

      4 Jun4 June 10:04

      Actually Brexit does have something to do with it. Firstly, there was no customs screening, as the used to be a blue channel at customs if you came from the EU. Secondly, the nature of those passport checks has changed due to Brexit. While it’s correct The UK was never in Schengen, UK nationals had freedom of movement, and checks were often perfunctory if not absent. That has changed now. Eurostar has been complaining that the limited passport checking capacity at St Pancras meant it had to reduce the number of trains running

      • Londonsteve says:

        4 Jun4 June 13:16

        Customs checks on travellers remain virtually non-existent so that’s a non-issue. They existed before and continue to exist now, the only difference is the absence of the blue channel but in practice this makes zero difference for travellers. As for how Brexit changed passport checks, there’s two sides to this. The pinch point is going from the UK to the EU due to the need for French police to conduct immigration checks in the UK before departure and the current need to physically stamp passport. Checks coming the other way into the UK are exactly the same as they were before. This article is about the temporary lack of facilities in Amsterdam which before or after Brexit causes exactly the same problem for UK-bound trains which wouldn’t exist as an impediment if checks could be conducted while the train was moving.

  • Londonsteve says:

    4 Jun4 June 08:31

    Brexit has nothing to do with it. People forget that the U.K. was never part of Schengen and always required passport checks. The bigger problem is the UK’s insistence on embarkation checks at point of departure rather than just arrival checks like seemingly every other country. If passport control took place at St Pancras then Eurostar could depart from any platform in Amsterdam…

    • The Streets says:

      4 Jun4 June 08:40

      The passport check desks in St Pancras still remain unused

      • Londonsteve says:

        4 Jun4 June 09:15

        And they’ll remain unused on the arrivals side unless the UK terminates the Le Touquet agreement that pushed immigration controls to the point of embarkation. Its because of this we have French police performing passport checks at St. Pancras, Dover and Folkestone, leading to capacity restraints. While I’m a complete Remainer and advocate excellent relations with the EU, really in this case it’s actually France’s problem that the UK left the EU and the queues of British travellers should be on French soil awaiting inward processing by the French authorities. The UK refuses to consider ending the Le Touquet agreement because it’s terrified of unchecked people arriving on UK soil and claiming asylum.

        • LittleNick says:

          4 Jun4 June 10:42

          In principle I agree that it would be far simpler to do arrival checks at St Pancras, but I believe there is the practical issue of lacking the physical space to be able to do it and queues forming back up to the platform when a train has come in.
          Secondly are you proposing that you do away with the French check on leaving St Pancras? It would still need to be done into Schengen leaving St Pancras otherwise the passengers would still need to be processed at each station en route to the final destination. Also if this were the case you have the issue of the train being unable to pick up passengers for intra-Schengen travel (e.g to travel from Lille to Brussels say) which the EU wouldn’t be keen on and have kicked up a fuss in a similar situation with the whole Lille loophole years ago.

        • Mike says:

          4 Jun4 June 11:11

          Considering the circumstances, they would be correct.

      • Ed_fly says:

        4 Jun4 June 10:06

        Not entirely. I had my passport checked at St Pancras on Friday night.

        • John says:

          4 Jun4 June 10:25

          I also had arrival checks at StP in 2017 and 2019, but they were just manual checks with no computers.

          The second time they wouldn’t let me pass until I got out my laptop, connected it to the wifi and loaded up my email to show them my eurostar booking.

          I could not show the booking on my phone because it, and my battery pack, had died because the eurostar power socket at my seat wasn’t working.

      • The real Swiss Tony says:

        4 Jun4 June 13:24

        But the passport desks at St P are only needed when the train comes in from somewhere without passport checks at the other end. Marne la Vallee was like this, meaning a queue of 800 people with tired kids waiting to get stamped back into the country. With that service now suspended, I guess it’s just the ski train that uses this facility???

        • Nick says:

          4 Jun4 June 16:48

          Ski train had UK passport checks on departure at Bourg Saint Maurice and Moutiers as far as I recall

    • John says:

      4 Jun4 June 12:24

      Clearly, Brexit has something to do with it. A lot more overhead at the border now. For instance, I am now subject to tighter doc requirements (national ID no longer good, passport has new validity requirements). There are new maximum stay requirements and visa rules. There is no longer a common market.

      It’s really surprising to me that some elect to ignore such frictions.

      • riku says:

        4 Jun4 June 14:31

        This extra delay thanks to brexit is totally obvious when you cross the schengen border somewhere like MUC or FRA. UK passport holders cannot use the electronic gates and must go through a much longer documentation check, plus queue with all the non European visitors. 30 minutes queuing and documentation check instead of 30 seconds via the electronic gates. And it will only get worse with upcoming EU entry requirements.

        • LittleNick says:

          4 Jun4 June 15:00

          Certainly at MUC airport, passport holders from Australia, Brazil, Chile, Israel, Japan, Canada, Republic of Korea, Monaco, New Zealand, Taiwan, UAE and US can use the automated gates which aren’t in the EU. It can be done but I suspect the Germans don’t want to enable it for UK.
          Yes agreed will get worse when all the biometric requirements come in.

        • Track says:

          5 Jun5 June 20:11

          The decision to disable e-gates for UK passport holders, a large group of travellers is unpractical and taken primarily out of spite / to create an inconvenience, formally framed as “not allowing British to cherry pick on benefits of EU membership”.

• Tankmc says:

  4 Jun4 June 08:18

  I have said it time again. Eurostar needs competition!

  • GeoffreyB says:

    4 Jun4 June 09:15

    Planes

    • Londonsteve says:

      4 Jun4 June 09:18

      Exactly. More the better to break Eurostar’s strangehold on the Paris and Brussels routes. Amsterdam was always a tougher nut to crack due to the longer journey time but 4 hours journey time is still competitive with flying when adding up the time taken to transit through airports.

      • Tom says:

        4 Jun4 June 10:53

        Except it’s really not, all the high margin business passengers travelling from London to Amsterdam will take the flight from LCY instead, which is who Eurostar needs to attract to be able to run a frequent service profitability. It’s not really possible to do a day trip for meetings on the Eurostar to Amsterdam – I imagine there is a very different passenger profile to Paris and Brussels.

        • flyforfun says:

          4 Jun4 June 11:56

          Not only business travellers. We were able to go from our place at the wharf to our friend in Amsterdam in 3hr 30mins door to door. That’s taking the DLR to City Airport, the plane to Schipol, the train to Amsterdam Centraal, and a tram to our friends place near the flower market. Even when he moved to North Amsterdam requiring a bus ride, that added only about 10mins to the journey. It’s the trip back that’s the pain, having to play the guessing game if Schipol is having a bad day or not!

        • patrick C says:

          5 Jun5 June 12:35

          Yes it is. As the climate can’t just be ignored forever. Mote and more companies are reducing air travel where possible.
          Also it is impossible for another operator to come in. This is really due to the UK’s pathetic border control which has never ever stopped a single illegal migrant or criminal.
          No other European country has any bottleneck of the sort.

  • SteveCroydon says:

    4 Jun4 June 09:18

    Yes, absolutely. Years ago Deutsche Bahn was going to start services through the tunnel, which came to nothing. I believe the French/SNCF put up every excuse/reason going to thwart the plan. Basically they didn’t want competition.
    I used to know someone who ran a specialist rail travel company. His view was that Eurostar was the worst operator to deal with at every level.
    This farce in Amsterdam/Rotterdam sounds worthy of British planning. Amsterdam Zuid – mmmm only 5.4Kms from Amsterdam Centraal – very convenient!!

    • Londonsteve says:

      4 Jun4 June 09:32

      While a separate company to Getlink who run Eurotunnel, they cooperate closely on every level. Eurostar can retain its monopoly by ensuring that Eurotunnel whips out the ace card regarding the safety of alternative rolling stock and its ability to operate on Eurotunnel’s power supply and signalling. This might explain why Eurostar flogs its old rolling stock to death and then scraps it rather than selling and upgrading lest it’s leased by a competitor who then has the ultimate ace card to overcome the standard excuse. It’s nearly 30 years since the first Eurostar service launched and we still have no alternative train service. I’d even be ok with a low-cost operator departing from Ebbsfleet and running into Marne la Vallee as some of the Ouigo TGVs do.

      • patrick C says:

        5 Jun5 June 12:42

        The real reason has nothing to do with this. The track charges are so obscene on the british side that it is impossible to.make decent gross margin. HS1 still has the really strange objective of making a profit and repay building cost. This is also why eurotunnel usage is not optimal.
        Add in the dumb, useless and expensive border infrastructure and you see why deutsche bahn dropped it

  • The Original David says:

    4 Jun4 June 09:21

    There must be dozens of AMS/RTM-LON flights daily, isn’t that competition?

  • Carole Ann says:

    4 Jun4 June 09:49

    Totally agree!!
    Last year we were advised two days into our holiday in Amsterdam that our return journey was cancelled! No assistance of how we could get an alternative train. Cost over £500 to fly back and a lot of correspondence to finally get refunded for Eurostars error!

  • Chris W says:

    4 Jun4 June 10:27

    Flying LCY-AMS is quicker door to door than the Eurostar. If that’s not competition I don’t know what is.

  • ADS says:

    4 Jun4 June 20:29

    I was pricing up a trip to Amsterdam a few weeks ago – Eurostar was over twice the price of flying

    Whilst I am happy to pay a small premium to avoid flying, I’m not prepared to pay double !

• TimM says:

  4 Jun4 June 09:14

  Passports should be redundant by now. Face-ID is good for greater than one in a million and should be enough to pick people out on the Interpol list, e.g. Putin. A passport appears to be an old-fashioned formality from a very different era.

  • John says:

    4 Jun4 June 10:22

    Unless we want facial recognition everywhere, there still needs to be a secure area of an Amsterdam station for people to wait once they have been Face-IDed as OK to enter the UK.

    Also the Channel Tunnel security checks would need to be abolished if you didn’t want a dedicated Eurostar terminal / boarding area.

• S says:

  4 Jun4 June 09:15

  As others have explained above, this is nothing to do with Brexit – and I say that as someone who thinks Brexit is an unmitigated clusterfuck in both conception and practice.

  However, it is related to Britain’s attitude towards border security: if the UK would accept passport checks being conducted on the train while it is in motion, the necessity of fixed passport desks at every departure station could be reduced.

  • Londonsteve says:

    4 Jun4 June 09:23

    It won’t because of its obsession with keeping people with the necessary papers away from British soil in case they claim asylum on arrival. This state of national psychosis goes back to the boom in numbers of asylum seekers under the Blair government which begat the Le Touquet accord. If they’ve boarded Eurostar it’s next stop UK and that presents an opportunity to make a formal claim for asylum when intercepted by the authorities on arrival. It makes you wonder how countries in Schengen manage their asylum process in an era of open borders; perhaps as with so many things we should be investigating their solutions rather than trying to reinvent the wheel.

    • Nick says:

      4 Jun4 June 10:38

      It goes back much further than Blair… for example, the famous Kindertransport only happened because the British refused to allow adult refugees to come.

    • lumma says:

      4 Jun4 June 12:44

      Have you ever experienced passport checks onboard a train? It tends to involve the train being stopped in the station closest to the border, while two immigration officers (one from each country) walk down the entire train checking and stamping passports with at least one more on the platform making sure no one is trying to hide.

      • Londonsteve says:

        4 Jun4 June 13:22

        I have experienced that. I’ve also had checks while the train is in motion between the first/last station of neighbouring countries. Developed states tend to employ the latter option as it doesn’t impede travelling times.

        • QFFlyer says:

          4 Jun4 June 16:05

          Yes I’ve experienced the latter, it was between Slovenia and Croatia, before the latter joined the EU. Novelty having a passport stamp with a steam train symbol rather than a plane on it!

        • JDB says:

          4 Jun4 June 17:23

          When Eurostar first started the checks were on board while the train was in motion.

      • TimM says:

        5 Jun5 June 08:24

        I travelled from Milan to Athens by train once. Not only were there officers of different countries forever checking passports (and luggage) but the coaches forever being changed so that we had to keep moving coach. Restaurant cars would join at the back then leave after the mealtime. Eurostar passengers have it very easy.

  • Ironside says:

    4 Jun4 June 15:07

    “However, it is related to Britain’s attitude towards border security”

    100% this. If so many of the electorate weren’t so pathetically petrified of foreigners, sensible arrangements could be made. But because Daily Fail readers are such dreadful cowards, we all have to suffer.

    • Mike says:

      4 Jun4 June 16:22

      “100% this. If so many of the electorate weren’t so pathetically petrified of foreigners, sensible arrangements could be made. But because Daily Fail readers are such dreadful cowards, we all have to suffer.”

      The immigration statistics prove everything you said to be nonsense.

• TC says:

  4 Jun4 June 09:29

  Talking of Eurostar. The direct service to Disneyland Paris will not run from 07 June 2023 until the end of the year. No guarantee they will bring it back for 2024 either. Anyone know why?

  • Londonsteve says:

    4 Jun4 June 10:51

    I don’t know what facilities for immigration exist at Marne la Vallee but they might be inadequate for the purposes of the French police checking that passengers haven’t overstayed their welcome in Schengen unless investment is made, which is likely to be pointless for the handful of direct services to London. They would also need to be staffed by UK Border Force. Eurostar meanwhile have used Covid and Brexit as an excuse to cut Ebbsfleet and Ashford services as they were likely never profitable against the cost of staffing up security and immigration services.

• RussellH says:

  4 Jun4 June 11:47

  Leaving the EU may not be the cause of the problems, but it has most certainly exacerbated them.
  The (necessarily) cramped controls at both St Pancras and Paris Nord have always suggested to me that the designers always assumed the the UK government would bow to the inevitable and join the Schengen area, meaning that trains from all over the UK could travel to anywhere in the rest of Europe without too many problems.
  Very sadly, a combination of UK paranoia about borders and of identity cards means that we are stuck where we are now.

• John A says:

  4 Jun4 June 15:14

  Just wait until the Anglo – Scottish border arrives.

  • BA Flyer IHG Stayer says:

    4 Jun4 June 18:27

    Funny.

    If there is ever a border between England and Scotland it’ll be because English politicians want to have one (to “own the Nats”) and not because of the Scots.

    • Chris says:

      5 Jun5 June 07:11

      It would be because Scotland had left the United Kingdom and joined the European Union, so there would have to be a border whether the English or Scottish liked it or not.

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