High-speed route
Southeastern Highspeed
London → Dover · England
Southeastern Highspeed in pictures
Photographs by their authors, hosted on Wikimedia Commons · tap through for the licence
- Distance
- 125 km
- Fastest time
- 1 h 3 min
- Average speed
- 119 km/h
- Top speed
- 225 km/h
- Operator
- Southeastern
- Train
- Class 395 Javelin
- Countries
- England
- In service since
- 2009
- Runs
- hourly, most continuing to Ramsgate via Deal
Figures are published values, not live data · corrections log
Britain’s only domestic high-speed service: 225 km/h down HS1 to Ashford, then the 1844 South Eastern main line past Folkestone and under the white cliffs into Dover.
Kent got high-speed trains almost as a by-product. HS1 was built for the Eurostars, and only in December 2009 did Southeastern begin running Hitachi-built Class 395s over it at 225 km/h — the first domestic high-speed service in Britain, and still the only one. A Javelin leaves St Pancras from the platforms next to the Paris trains, holds the international line as far as Ashford, then drops onto the South Eastern main line of 1844: Folkestone, the ledge beneath Abbot’s Cliff where the railway runs at the foot of the white cliffs, and down into Dover. Ashford, which used to be an hour and a quarter from London, is now 37 minutes.
How this line was checked
- Line drawn from OpenStreetMap relation 12648799 — 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 4 m from it
- The operator publishes this line's timetable: Southeastern — 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
- HS1 under the Thames and across the Medway
- Ashford International
- Folkestone and the Channel Tunnel portal
- Abbot’s Cliff and Samphire Hoe beneath the white cliffs
- Dover Priory
More high-speed routes
- Eurostar
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.
Wikipedia ↗ - 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 ↗
More train routes in United Kingdom · England.