High-speed route
Southeastern Highspeed
London → Margate · England
Southeastern Highspeed in pictures
Photographs by their authors, hosted on Wikimedia Commons · tap through for the licence
- Distance
- 147 km
- Fastest time
- 1 h 26 min
- Average speed
- 103 km/h
- Top speed
- 225 km/h
- Operator
- Southeastern
- Train
- Class 395 Javelin
- Countries
- England
- In service since
- 2009
- Runs
- hourly
Figures are published values, not live data · corrections log
The Javelin put Margate 86 minutes from London — HS1 at 225 km/h as far as Ashford, then the 1846 Canterbury line across east Kent to the Thanet coast.
The Class 395 got its Javelin name shuttling spectators to the 2012 Olympics in seven minutes flat, but its lasting effect was on the Kent coast. Thanet had been a slow corner of England — two hours and more from London — and the high-speed timetable brought Margate inside ninety minutes. The trick is a hybrid: 225 km/h on HS1 as far as Ashford, then third rail and 160 km/h on the line the South Eastern Railway opened to Canterbury and Ramsgate in 1846, running through the Stour gap past Wye and Chilham before crossing east Kent to the sea.
How this line was checked
- The 137 km this route shares with OpenStreetMap relation 452778 is drawn from that relation's own nodes, thinned to within under 25 m of them
- Checked against OpenStreetMap: 99% of this line lies within 250 m of real track, a median 5 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
- HS1 across the Kent Downs
- Ashford International
- The Stour gap at Wye and Chilham
- Canterbury West and the cathedral city
- Ramsgate’s Royal Harbour
- Margate sands and the Turner Contemporary
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