June 2007

Paul,  another  regular Ashford to Brussels passenger has been so incensed by an email he recently received from Eurostar that he sent us a copy of his reply to Eurostar’s customer service department. Read on…

Ré: You’re only 57 minutes from our new station at Ebbsfleet International…

Please can you forward this to the relevant person? I would appreciate a reply from the correct source.

Thank you very much for this information. However, it appears that you have completely missed the point with regard to Ebbsfleet and Ashford stations with regard to Kent users.

You point out that it takes 57 minutes to drive to Ebbsfleet. However, let us put this into actual context.

I usually catch the 0659 train to Brussels from Ashford. This arrives at 0940 and allows me to be at a meeting for 1000 or shortly after. A wonderful service. I leave home in Whitstable at 0550 for a gentle cross country drive of 25 minutes maximum with no traffic to Ashford (note the no traffic and the 25 minutes), this gives the required time to park and be in the terminal 30 minutes before.

At present there are no timetables for trains from Ebbsfleet. However it is a simple assumption that the train must take at least 10/15 minutes to travel between Ebbsfleet and Asford, so it may be expected that if a train is to arive in Brussels at 0940, it must be leaving Ebbsfleet at say 0645. Therefore I have to be at Ebbsfleet and parked by 0605, which will mean leaving home at 0505.

Traffic - has anyone from your organisation tried to leave Kent via the A2/M2 route in the morning. I do this regularly. Not withstanding the present roadworks (1/2 years), hopefully relieving the congestion when they are complete, the traffic stops around 2 miles short of the Ebbsfleet turnoff and crawls to the bottom of the hill below the Ebbsfleet turnoff. This occurs at any time from 0545 onwards in the mornings. Any further traffic caused by the Thames Gateway building project will only add to this.

So to be safe, to make sure that I catch a train scheduled to leave at 0645, I will probably have to leave home at 0450. A full hour before I leave now, doing a day’s work in Brussels and then an hour’s drive home.

It almost makes more sense for me to use Eurotunnel and drive - I won’t go through the maths.

So please think it through before emailing me with information, such that I am only 57 minutes from Ebbsfleet, to catch a train, that will by definition have to leave earlier to arrive at the same time, pointing out that I have to leave home an hour earlier than I have to now. I am only 25 minutes from Ashford with no traffic problems.

I do hope that there is no plan to change the Brussels train arrival time.

In the light of the above I would strongly recommend the re-instatement of a stop at Ashford for the Brussels train - I do not understand why a five minute stop with the associated five minutes of decelleration and acceleration causes problems with either journey time or energy usage.

I wonder when you will be closing your new Stratford staion to make these savings, after all it is only 73 miles from Ebbsfleet with a journey time of 71 minutes……. Excuse my irony but perhaps it helps to make the point.

Regards

With Eurostar’s home changing from London Waterloo to London St Pancras in November , Eurostar know they have a lot of awareness-raising to carry out among their customers. So being a perfectly (ahem) sensible company, Eurostar decided earlier this year to do something about it: they set up a roadshow of meetings in 50 towns and cities across the UK to sell the benefits of the new link.

Although Ashford was not on their list of towns to visit, a number of other towns in the south east were. Crawley, Brighton, Tunbridge Wells and Canterbury all played host to a Eurostar roadshow in recent weeks and cheerful invitations were sent out by a PR consultancy on Eurostar’s behalf to the great and the good in each area.

Now, many Ashford passengers, being reasonable people, would have welcomed the chance to go along to one of these meetings. Eurostar, after all, have yet to meet a delegation of their regular Ashford passengers and this could have been the ideal opportunity. After 9 months of dispute, a face-to-face meeting with passengers to debate the reasons behind the axing of Brussels services from Ashford might have helped start restoring their reputation among their passengers.

One Ashford passenger, a member of Eurostar’s “carte blanche” frequent traveller scheme, found out about the meeting in Canterbury and wrote to Eurostar asking why frequent travellers were not being invited. In the same cheery tone as the original invitation, he was sent a list of the categories of people who qualified for an invitation - for example MPs, councillors and journalists -but was told that there was not enough spaces at the meetings to open them up to frequent travellers!

Now we could be flippant and congratulate Eurostar on filling up so many spaces, something that eludes them on many of their trains. However, there is a serious point here: who, at the end of the day, finances Eurostar? Passengers, of course, are Eurostar’s prime source of revenue and frequent travellers spend many thousands of pounds a year. Surely it can’t make commercial sense - especially as Eurostar has yet to turn a profit - to dismiss a client’s concerns so lightly in this way?

The local press have had a busy Eurostar day today. First came the BBC, then the Kent Messenger joined in. The reason: Eurostar have announced their passengers will get “free travel on local railway services in Kent when Ebbsfleet opens”.

From 19th November, so the story goes, thanks to a deal between Eurostar and local franchise holder Southeastern, Eurostar passengers will only have to show their passport and Eurostar booking confirmation to be able to travel for free on local trains in Kent. And this goes for journeys to or from Ashford and Ebbsfleet stations.

Now, anyone who has travelled to Belgium will know that this sort of deal is good news. After all, with your current Eurostar ticket, Belgian state railways allow you to travel onward to any station in Belgium. The mind starts racing as to what to do with your Eurostar ticket: leave medieval Canterbury at breakfast and enjoy lunch in the shadow of Leuven’s breathtaking gothic town hall; or how about going from Dover to Oostende - one ferry port to another - without even getting on a boat or stepping into a car.

Ah, with Eurostar, it seems we can dream at last. Or can we? As ever, the devil is in the detail.

First, as we have said many times, Eurostar’s proposed timetable changes mean there will be no more direct trains from Brussels to Ashford. Instead, you will have to travel some 50 kilometres further north to Ebbsfleet. What we haven’t said, however, is if you like making connecting rail journeys, you’ll find yourself in for a lot of fun with Ebbsfleet.

You see, whereas with a quick platform change at Ashford, you can get trains across east and West Kent, you can travel south to Dover or along the Sussex coast to Hastings and Brighton, Ebbsfleet can’t offer these connections. There will be no connecting domestic trains until 2009. Before then, you have to walk, or take the new Fasttrack bus service - also offered free to Eurostar passengers - to a nearby local railway station.

Perhaps you’ll choose the nearest station, Northfleet, a station with an “interesting and varied history”according to the Kentrail.co.uk website. Along with some tasteful photos, Kentrail helpfully explains why all the windows are covered up: it’s because of the building’s “limited opening hours and frequent vandalism.”

So you’ve passed your first test, getting to the nearby railway station. But can you get to the same places that you could from Ashford? To find out, we need the help of a travel planning website. Step forth the government’s flagship site, the mighty www.transportdirect.info

First, we tried to enter Ebbsfleet into the website. Unfortunately, as the website told us, “No options found for “Ebbsfleet “ as ‘Station/airport’. So we just had to settle on Northfleet after all.

Undaunted by this little setback, we then picked a time of day for our journey. For argument’s sake, we chose 10am.

Now for our destinations. First up, that journey to Canterbury.

Transportdirect comes back with a train at 10:25am, taking one hour 34 minutes to get there and involving two changes of train. Oh dear, not a good start, especially as the 10:07 train from Ashford gets you to Canterbury in 17 minutes. In fact, you could wait at Ashford and catch any one of the next four trains and still get to Canterbury earlier.

Okay, let’s try another journey. How about West Malling, home of the huge King’s Hill business park? You can leave Ashford at 10:05am and be there in 37 minutes. How does Ebbsfleet (er, Northfleet) compare?

Well, you can get a train towards London at 10:14am, almost at the same time as from Ashford. So far so good. Once in London, a quick dash at London Bridge means you can get a direct train to, er, “Ashford” that goes via West Malling. The time difference? A mere one hour and 6 minutes more via London.

Tonbridge then? 23 minutes direct from Ashford, 1 hour 31 with a change in London from Northfleet.

Brighton? Well, Eurostar’s free connecting journey offer won’t be valid on this route because, as far as we know, they are not looking to negotiate an agreement with Southern, the train operator that runs the service from Ashford to Brighton. However, even this journey along the south coast was quicker than getting a train from Northfleet.

We could go on but I think you’re starting to get the picture. It’s frustrating in a way because we, as regular Ashford passengers, would like to see Eurostar do well. Today’s story should have been a step in the right direction with international and local trains linking up to provide a seamless, environmentally friendly journey. It could have been the start of a major “drive” (ahem) to get passengers travelling to the Eurostar by train. However, because Eurostar do not intend to stop trains at Ashford and Ebbsfleet, it seems unlikely that many people will make use of this offer.

As we are beginning to expect, nothing is ever quite what it seems in the wonderful world of Eurostar press releases.

Neil P., an Ashford passenger, responds to the campaign and argues that government and Eurostar should think again:

I think the Website is excellent and it more than adequately documents the history of the campaign.

Two areas that might be added are:

A. despite the fact that Eurostar is a private company and has been given the authority to operate the franchise as it sees fit, and therefore is at liberty to remove stations from the service if it thinks there is business justification, the Government has at least a moral obligation, if not a statutory one, to ensure that the public money that has been invested in Ashford Station and in the infrastructure of the dedicated high speed railway line to the continent, and indeed in the Channel Tunnel itself, is used to the maximum benefit of all UK taxpayers; it should therefore exercise influence over Eurostar to ensure Ashford and passengers using it continue to be served reasonably by Eurostar.

B. passengers currently using Ashford for Eurostar, and wishing to continue to do so, are drawn from a wide area of South East England - not limited to Kent - but also from East Sussex. Because of Ashford’s excellent rail conections, many of them are able to effect their entire journey using public transport and in so doing are contributing to a reduction in the motor car’s impact on the environment. None of the passengers in this category will be able to make their Eurostar journeys without either using cars or making protracted public transport journeys that will add hours if Ebbsfleet becomes the only alternative to Ashford for journeys to Brussels.