Track star

By Ben Thompson, Senior Editor

As CEO of high-speed rail operator Eurostar, Richard Brown is a central figure in one of the most exciting periods in the history of European railways. EU Infrastructure’s Senior Editor Ben Thompson caught up with him to discuss the future of rail in Europe and why expanding the network is critical.

“It's very challenging driving a new line through a pretty densely urbanised area like London and the surrounding suburbs, so that project involved a lot of consultation”
-Richard Brown, Eurostar

The first thing you notice on arrival at Eurostar’s London headquarters is the gothic splendour of the recently revamped St Pancras station, the company’s new centre of operations. Over the past few years, a spectacular modernisation programme has seen the terminus transformed from a soot-smeared, unloved and half-empty shell of a building into one of the continent’s most impressive transport hubs. And as Europe’s gateway into London, St Pancras is set to be reborn as one of the capital’s iconic landmarks.

The catalyst for the renovation was Eurostar’s decision to relocate there from its previous base at Waterloo. The high-profile move, designed as the first stage in CEO Richard Brown’s grand plan to make the high-speed rail network more accessible to millions of Britons – and the UK more accessible to European visitors – has been an unprecedented success. Passenger numbers are up, journey times are down and Eurostar recently announced record sales figures. Brown is a happy man. But what other challenges are on the horizon for the company and its charismatic chief executive? EU Infrastructure caught up with him to find out.

EUI. There’s been a huge expansion in the high-speed rail network across continental Europe over the last few years, and now it is also over here in the UK. What opportunities has this opened up for Eurostar?
RB. Well, first and foremost, the completion of the UK’s first high-speed line represented a complete overhaul of our initial network, enabling us run high-speed rail all the way through from central London to central Paris and central Brussels. It’s reduced the journey times significantly – the fastest time from Brussels-London is 1hr 51 minutes, and Paris-London is 2hrs 15, which has really improved the accessibility between three of Europe’s key cities.

EUI. And I guess it offers the opportunity to increase expansion across all of the other high-speed rail networks in Europe?
RB. That’s the second phase, if you like. The first phase is just our core markets: Brussels-London and Paris-London, where we’ve seen tremendous growth as a result of the high-speed line. We’ve seen 25 percent in sales growth and 18 percent passenger growth in the first half of the year versus last year, which is pretty good.

That’s partly about faster times and the increased accessibility to the market for day trips by business people between London and Paris. The market for people using that has more than doubled because we can now get people to London before 8am in the morning and Brussels before 9am in the morning. It allows people to do a full day’s work without having to take in a hotel, so it’s improving productivity for business people.

EUI. I guess the key advantage is that it delivers people from city centre to city centre.
RB. Absolutely. Our new hub at St Pancras International is a much better, more accessible terminal station in London than Waterloo. For one thing, it’s the right side of Central London (most people live north of London, not south) and it’s on six London underground lines. So, it’s accessible to the rest of London and to the rest of Britain. And the new line is more reliable. It’s a new, purpose-built infrastructure, and as such our punctuality rates for the first half of this year are 92.6 percent. The comparable figure for the airline industry is 62 percent punctuality. So, it’s a service that people know they can depend on.

For phase two, we see High Speed 1 as plugging Britain and Eurostar into that extended European high-speed network. So through Railteam – the group of eight of the north European high-speed train operators – we’re working hard to develop through-travel from one operator to another using a simple fare structure and easy-to-access timetable information, so travelling around that rapidly growing network becomes as easy as travelling domestically.

EUI. I guess the key idea there is the access the new line provides to the rest of the European network, meaning you can utilise existing infrastructure rather than having to build that yourself?
RB. Exactly. Each new link in that infrastructure network contributes to the performance of existing links, as well as providing new accessibility for operators and opening up new journeys between new cities for passengers. So, there’s a lot of synergy as that network continues to expand. For instance, France and Spain will be joined up in the next few years with high-speed. So, you will be able to take Eurostar from London to Paris and switch to TGV from Paris to Spain. It really does open up a much wider range of journey possibilities.

EUI. Clearly there’re a lot of opportunities, and I have no doubt that connecting up that infrastructure also presents a number of challenges. What are the key challenges for you in terms of infrastructure development?
RB. For the UK, the key challenge is whether we will see a High Speed 2 and a High Speed 3 linking the rest of Britain into London and to Europe. There’s a growing body of opinion, particularly in some of the regional cities, that being linked to that Europe-wide network will be essential in the coming years.

On the continent, I think it’s much more accepted that high-speed is the way forward. The challenge is just continuing to run out the network. As an operator, the challenges are more how we get the reservation systems and the fare systems for what are essentially national railways to talk to each other and to link up for consumers, which is a key project for Railteam. Then having done that, to put in place simple, attractive through fares. At the moment, if somebody wants to go from London to Austria, you end up putting fares together from two, if not three, different operators for different portions of the journey. And it’s no surprise that what you end up with doesn’t necessarily bare much relation to the market price. So that’s clearly a big challenge: to get national operators to think in terms of an international market.

EUI. What do you think the market is for further expansion of the high-speed rail network within Great Britain? I was speaking to somebody recently who suggested that we are better off modernising the existing rail infrastructure to meet 21st century standards rather than building completely new lines…
RB. I think he’s a bit behind emerging thinking. There is undoubtedly huge potential for additional high-speed lines in the UK, and I think there are three main strands to the business case. First and foremost, it will improve accessibility between regions within the UK. Air services are already pretty congested, and they’re not going to get any better: concerns over climate change mean the addition of new flights is not an option, and you can’t fly any faster because of the extra fuel this uses. You could build more roads, but nobody’s suggesting that as a solution – besides which, the new roads would not really be any faster than existing roads. The only way of improving accessibility and bringing journey times down is therefore to build high-speed rail lines.

The second argument is transport capacity. It’s generally recognised by both the UK government as well as the rail industry that we’re going to need to look at new rail lines in the UK over the next 20 years because existing lines will be full to capacity in that timeframe. And if we’re going to build a new line, then surely we should build it to 21st century standards? The incremental costs of building new lines to high-speed specifications are quite low compared with the costs of building the new line in the first place.

EUI. I think he was advocating the modernisation of the existing railway lines rather than prioritising the construction of new lines…
RB. This is where the thinking in he UK has moved on quite a lot in recent years. The experience of upgrading the West Coast Mainline has shown that even modernisation programmes can be very complex – upgrading the existing lines is extremely disruptive and very expensive and does not produce the same degree of benefits. In fact, only last July the UK government said very clearly that not only can we anticipate the need for more capacity over the next 20 years, but also that the best way of providing additional capacity is building new lines.

Of course, the third argument is the sustainability/environmental angle. For one thing, high-speed rail is electric because diesel engines cannot develop the sort of power-to-weight ratio that you need to travel at these higher speeds. And the fact that we run on electricity allows us to source energy from any fuel source, meaning we can go to the cleanest types of energy possible, whether that be nuclear, renewable, carbon-sequestered coal, whatever. So, it’s a low-carbon, future-proof method of travel as well, and it’s already greener than flying or driving and will get greener still in the future.

EUI. So if the arguments are so compelling, why do we not have any plans in place to further expand the high-speed network in this country?
RB. That’s a very good question. The issue of why Britain does not have a high-speed network when every other major European country is rapidly expanding theirs certainly needs resolving. Part of it is that we in Britain have had a lower level of investment in transport, particularly in rail, than a lot of other Europeans countries. It’s also partly a matter of the political will required to commit to an initiative that could take 20 years to see through from initial concept to opening. There are an awful lot of planning processes to go through on a project of this size and scope – routes to approve, stakeholders to consult, due process procedures to implement, and so on. I think High Speed 1 took nine years from the start of construction to project completion because we are such a densely populated country. So, these things are not quick. This is a long-term project.

The UK rail network is steadily improving; on the West Coast Mainline, the completion of the final round of improvements should see frequency go up and journey times come down. And there are quite significant improvements that have been planned for the East Coast route, too, to improve frequency and journey times. But it’s all incremental improvement. What’s needed, in particular for the longer-term, is a further step change, which only proper high-speed rail can bring.

EUI. Let’s talk a little bit about the move to St Pancras, which took place last November. You moved overnight, in one night – that must have been quite some undertaking?
RB. Yes, it was. We spent three years planning it, progressively putting in the detail, and broke it down into three main segments, managing each one as a separate project. The first part was the move itself, and believe it or not, moving to St Pancras was the easy part of that project! The hard part was simultaneously moving our maintenance operation overnight from its previous base in West London to the new one on the new line near Stratford in East London. That was seriously hard, because we do all our maintenance overnight, and doing that without interruption to service was the big challenge. So, that was the first project.

We also had a project that ran for a year to keep staff well-informed, show them the new locations, answer all their questions and provide them with the basic information to pass on to passengers. For one thing, we were quite worried that we would lose a number of staff in the process because of longer journey times to work in the morning and the extra hassle of moving to a new location; and secondly, we wanted our staff to be enthusiastic and knowledgeable about the move so that they could translate the benefits to our customers.

Then the third project was focused on taking our passengers with us and communicating the details of the move to over eight million of our customers. In the event, we only had five people turn up at Waterloo in the first week after we moved –a Japanese couple who didn’t speak very good English, and a family of three who had booked months before to go to Disney, and didn’t read the newspapers. It was pretty amazing, really.

EUI. And what benefits does the new station offer?
RB. For starters, we’ve got at least 70 percent more capacity at St Pancras in terms of our ability to handle passengers. The biggest constraint on our capacity, believe it or not, is passenger baggage screening, and Waterloo just wasn’t set up to handle the huge volumes we’d like. At St Pancras, we basically use pretty much the same processes as the airline industry, which is unique. I think the Spanish have limited security on their high-speed trains because of their recent experience of terrorism, but we’re pretty unique amongst train companies in having that level of security. It’s obviously important that passengers feel safe and secure and they’re reassured.

EUI. Obviously you’re an operator, but to what extent were you involved in the construction of the new station, upgrading the lines, that type of thing?
RB. Well, the line itself was largely set and designed years ago. Technically it was a really complex project – obviously it’s very challenging driving a new line through a pretty densely urbanised area like London and the surrounding suburbs, so that project involved a lot of consultation and we were involved in that, naturally. We were also very closely involved in the final layout and design of the operation at St Pancras, in terms of advising on passenger flows and those types of things. It wasn’t easy, because the original St Pancras station is a historic building and is Grade One listed, so everything that happens there in terms of new construction, renovation or modernisation has to be approved by English Heritage. So reconciling the need to provide a modern transport infrastructure within the setting of a historically significant building was our major challenge.

New facility offers maintenance opportunity
The design of the new maintenance facility in East London was largely driven by the Eurostar team and its layout was based on the operational requirements of the maintenance crews. “At our previous facility, we had two different maintenance sheds: one for high throughput, overnight servicing and one for heavy maintenance involving more significant work,” explains Brown. “We have just one shed at our new base in Temple Hills, but one that offers a much higher degree of versatility in terms of what we can do there.”

One key advantage is the ability to dramatically cut down on the unnecessary movement of trains around the facility. “It takes quite a while to trundle quarter-mile-long trains all over the place to go through the washing machines, to go through the toilet discharge facility, to go over the systems that check the wheels, and so on,” says Brown. “At Temple Hill, we were able to optimise the layout so that we could minimise the amount of train movements and maximise the amount of time available to work on each train.”

An additional benefit was that the company was able to cut down on the time staff spent travelling around the huge facility. “It’s about two-and-a-half miles long, from one end to the other. The actual shed is obviously just a quarter-mile long (a train length) but even so, if you’re working in a car at one end of the shed and you’ve got to go to the store at the other end to pick up a replacement component, it’s still a half-mile roundtrip. It’s actually a quite interesting logistics exercise.” To help address the challenge, staff now use bicycles to get from one end of the shed to the other.

St Pancras in numbers
£5.8 billion The total cost of the Eurostar High Speed 1 project, including £800 million spent on restoring and modernising St Pancras station
50 million Man-hours required to complete the Eurostar High Speed 1 project, including the renovation of St Pancras
1 million Bricks replaced with new ones cast from Leicestershire clay, sourced specially to ensure they are the same colour as the originals
300,000 Welsh roof slates replaced, with the material dug from the same quarry as for the originals
18,000 Self-cleaning panes of glass used on the roof
8000 People involved in the restoration and modernisation of St Pancras
1868 Year when the original station, with its vast, single-span roof and Victorian Gothic facade, opened
3500 The highest number of workers on site at any time
96 The length in metres of the station’s champagne bar, the longest in Europe
60 The number of shops on the mainline rail and Underground concourses
21 Different nationalities have worked on site
6 The number of Eurostar platforms (also the number of King’s Cross St Pancras Underground platforms)
4 The number of Midland Mainline platforms
3 The number of platforms for the new high-speed Kent rail link run by Southeastern
2 The number of Thameslink platforms, replacing the station in Pentonville Road