Eurostar London–Paris

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.

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

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
• See for yourself: open this line on the map with OpenStreetMap's own railway drawn underneath it

Questions and answers

How long is the Eurostar?

The Eurostar runs 492 km from London to Paris. It runs through England and France.

How long does the Eurostar take?

The fastest scheduled journey is 2 h 18 min for the 492 km. That is an average of 214 km/h end to end. The line's top service speed is 300 km/h.

Who runs the Eurostar?

Eurostar, with e320, Class 374.

How old is the Eurostar?

The line has been in service since 1994. That is the year the atlas dates it from: for a modern brand running over an older railway, it is the railway's date, not the brand's.

How often does the Eurostar run?

Roughly hourly, about 15× daily each way.

View on the world railway map →

Read more on Wikipedia ↗