High-speed route
Eurostar
London → Paris · England · France
Eurostar in pictures
Photographs by their authors, hosted on Wikimedia Commons · tap through for the licence
- Distance
- 492 km
- Fastest time
- 2 h 18 min
- Average speed
- 214 km/h
- Top speed
- 300 km/h
- Operator
- Eurostar
- Train
- e320 · Class 374
- Countries
- England, France
- In service since
- 1994
- Runs
- roughly hourly, about 15× daily each way
- Riders per year
- ≈ 7.5M
Figures are published values, not live data · corrections log
Drops 75 m below the sea through the 50.5 km Channel Tunnel, 37.9 km of it under the seabed, the longest undersea stretch of any rail tunnel.
Board beneath William Barlow’s great blue train shed at St Pancras and minutes later you are racing across the Kent countryside on HS1, Britain’s only dedicated high-speed line. After the brief darkness of the crossing, the train stretches out over the beet plains of Picardy on LGV Nord, running city centre to city centre faster than any airline manages door to door. It is the service that made day-tripping between two capitals ordinary: breakfast by the Thames, lunch on the Left Bank.
How this line was checked
- Line drawn from OpenStreetMap relation 2905798 — the same nodes OpenStreetMap holds for this railway, thinned to within under 25 m of them
- Checked against OpenStreetMap: the whole line lies on real track, a median 6 m from it
- The operator publishes this line's timetable: Eurostar — a place to look it up, not a check of our drawing
- Wikipedia has an article for this line
Along the way
- St Pancras International’s Barlow train shed
- Medway crossing and the Kent Downs
- the Channel Tunnel plunge
- Picardy beet plains on LGV Nord
- Gare du Nord’s neoclassical façade
More high-speed routes
- TGV inOui
France’s original 1981 LGV forms the first leg; today the TGV holds 320 km/h nearly all the way to the Mediterranean.
Wikipedia ↗ - AVE
Scheduled at 310 km/h, Europe’s fastest timetable, this line flipped one of the world’s busiest air routes to rail.
Wikipedia ↗ - AVE
Spain’s first AVE, built for Expo ’92 in standard gauge, the line that reset Spanish railways.
Wikipedia ↗ - ICE Sprinter
The €10bn VDE 8 project: 26 tunnels and 37 viaducts through the Thuringian Forest halved the Berlin–Munich journey.
Wikipedia ↗
More train routes in United Kingdom · France · England.
Planning this trip? Journey time & direct trains: London → Paris · Paris → London.