Britain’s rail regulator has given Virgin Trains approval to access HS1, the high-speed railway between St Pancras and the Channel Tunnel. This is another step towards Virgin running trains to Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam from 2030.
Author
- Marcus Mayers
Visiting Research Fellow, Intelligent Mobility, Manchester Metropolitan University
Virgin proposes to start services to Paris initially, with Brussels and Amsterdam to follow, eventually reaching around 20 daily return services.
The company now enters a very different market. Rail is already the established choice over flying between London and Paris. The key questions are whether Virgin can operate more efficiently than Eurostar and persuade passengers that two trains making the same journey are not really the same product.
When Eurostar launched in 1994, four million passengers a year flew between London and Paris. In 2025, almost ten million people travelled between the two cities by air or rail: 7.6 million by Eurostar and 2.3 million by air. Eurostar didn’t simply take passengers from airlines. It helped create a market two-and-a-half times larger whilst mostly eliminating meaningful city-to-city air competition.
Exploiting opportunity
That is exactly the sort of opportunity Virgin has historically been good at exploiting. Its transport businesses has rarely relied on being the cheapest. Instead, it has made otherwise similar journeys feel like different products. Virgin Trains demonstrated this on the West Coast Main Line. Avanti now operates the same railway, but without the same distinctive customer proposition.
Seen this way, Eurostar starts to look rather like British Airways did to Virgin Atlantic in the 1980s. The challenge is not solely to convince more people to travel by rail. It is to make them care which rail company they travel with.
Virgin’s choice of train could help. Its proposed fleet consists of 12 Alstom Avelia Stream trains around 200 metres long . This allows Virgin to match the size of the train more closely to passenger demand. Virgin could use one train when demand is weaker and couple two together when it needs the capacity of a full-length international train. That choice may matter most on the Brussels and Amsterdam routes, where demand is lower than for Paris. Eurostar’s 900-seat trains often leave with significant unused capacity.
Eurostar’s 900-seat trains often leave with unused capacity, whereas Virgin’s roughly 500-seat trains will be much closer to the size those markets need. A shorter train is also easier to “stable” or store off the track. The advantage is being able to match the amount of train more closely to demand.
Thalys was a separate high-speed operator connecting Paris and Brussels with Amsterdam and western Germany. Eurostar and Thalys were brought together under Eurostar Group in 2022. That gave Eurostar scale, but also organisational complexity, multiple fleets and inherited systems.
Virgin gets to start with 12 identical new trains and build the organisation around them. That gives the company the opportunity to concentrate more of its people and money on the parts passengers notice.
One indication of that different operating philosophy is turnaround time. Eurostar’s current access agreement gives it a turnaround of at least 52 minutes at St Pancras. At Euston, planning assumptions allowed turnrounds from 30 minutes.
On a simplified London-Paris round trip, reducing turnrounds from 52 to 30 minutes at each end would remove 44 minutes from the operating cycle. The proportion of the cycle during which an expensive train is moving passengers rises from roughly 72% to 82%. At sufficient scale, that means providing the same number of services with fewer trains. The capital saving could plausibly be worth around £2 to £5 per passenger journey.
Capacity constraints are not absolute . There is spare capacity for trains, while the infrastructure owners are increasing international passenger capacity at the stations.
The lesson from 1994 is that Eurostar did not simply divide the existing London-Paris market with the airlines. It made the market larger. Virgin need not build its business solely by taking passengers from Eurostar. It can also look for journeys Eurostar has decided are not worth serving.
Ashford and Ebbsfleet are obvious examples, as Eurostar has not served either station since 2020 . Virgin has told the regulator that its trains would stop in Kent if the international stations reopen .
A smaller train makes that sort of market more interesting, and so does competition. An incumbent naturally concentrates on the markets that best fit its existing railway. A challenger has an incentive to find passengers the incumbent has overlooked.
Little direct impact
The move towards nationalisation with Great British Railways (GBR) has little direct impact on this international competition. HS1 and St Pancras sit outside the core infrastructure that GBR will manage, although the Office of Rail and Road retains its independent regulatory role over HS1 access. Domestic railways are taking a different route. GBR is intended to manage most of the national railway, determine how its capacity is used and operate most passenger services.
A commercial operator wanting to run from London to Paris can seek independently regulated access to infrastructure controlled separately from the train company it wants to compete against. The same company wanting to run from London to Manchester would be seeking scarce capacity from an organisation that also operates the competing passenger service.
Setting up a new international train operator requires compatible trains , Channel Tunnel and national approvals, paths across several networks, border and security arrangements, and maintenance and stabling on both sides of the Channel.
It is extraordinarily difficult. Yet Parliament may be inadvertently creating a railway where it is easier for a new British commercial operator to secure independent access to run trains from London to Paris than from London to Manchester.
