Airline lobbying pulled tracks from under railway hopes
Anniversary reflections reveal dashed expectations and early Euroscepticism
THIRTY years ago this past week, a transport link opened that would offer travellers and an alternative to crossing the English Channel by air or by sea.
On May 6th, 1994, the Channel Tunnel officially opened and The Queen travelled from London to Paris by train.
Although regular Eurostar passenger services didn’t start until the autumn, the day was seen by UK-based Europhiles as significant; indeed, as significant as when drilling ahd started and the day, four years earlier, when engineers shook hands as two tunnels met, tens of metres below the sea bed.
At that time – the mid-1990s – expectations of greater and easier direct links from more of Great Britain to ‘the continent’ were being raised.
In the introduction to his history of Night Trains; The Rise and Fall of the Sleeper, renowned railway author Andrew Martin tells how he travelled on a Eurostar train from London’s Waterloo station to Paris on the second day of public services in the November.
‘I picked up a leaflet headlined “What’s next?” which boasted: “In early 1997, night trains will be introduced, travelling from Scotland, the North West, South Wales and the West into Paris … Passengers can enjoy a good night’s rest in comfortable accommodation and arrive refreshed in the morning”.’
I was living in Bradford, West Yorkshire. A good friend, a journalist working for the BBC’s French service stayed for a few days. I’d offered him a base while he produced a series of reports about direct train services expected to link the North East of England with Paris and onward to Brussels, Amsterdam, Cologne and perhaps even Berlin.
The BBC World Service then broadcast several hours of programming in French every day, to France itself and to Francophone Africa from its headquarters at Bush House, on the Aldwych, in the West End of London, funded directly by taxpayers through the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, a legacy of transmissions that had begun during the 1939-45 World War.
My friend was in Yorkshire to talk to political and business leaders in the region about daily train services from Glasgow, Edinburgh, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, York, Leeds, Sheffield and Birmingham direct to destinations ‘on the continent’.
They would not stop in London, although those using England’s ‘East Coast Main Line’ from Edinburgh via Newcastle and Peterborough, further south, would have had to go to Willesdon in north west London before reversing to by-pass central London using, at that time, little used tracks via Olympia and Clapham Junction to join the ‘standard speed’ route from Waterloo to the Kent coast.
These ‘Nightstar’ services never appeared. Sleeper and daytime carriages were built, so was a maintenance depot near Manchester. According to Andrew Martin, they were early victims of the lobbying power of emerging budget airlines. The trains went, by sea, to Canada.
Only after emerging from the Tunnel at Calais Frétun would the new trains be able to take advantage of the lignes de grand vitesse – high-speed lines – speeding into existence across much of Europe.
Hopes were high too that improving relations between the UK and EU – mainly a consequence of prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s acceptance of the single market and the appearance of the Schengen zone, with greater ease of movement – would allow commute services between Lille and London, so many UK passport holders living in the Pas de Calais could commute to jobs in and around Ashford while Kentish men and women could head to France. For UK residents, taking the Underground to work would no longer be restricted to those in London or Glasgow.
Unmet expectations and nascent Europhobia
Fast-forward 30 years and consider how the relationship between the UK and EU might be totally different now if Loiners crossing the concourse of Leeds railway station had seen trains to Lille on the departure boards, with Cologne on the boards for travellers in Crewe, Brussels for Brummies and Amsterdam for Aberdonians.
What happened can be seen as a parable about UK Conservative Party attitudes to both Europe and the railways.
In the 1980s, the UK’s regions had discovered a warmer welcome in Brussels from the European Union than in Westminster or Whitehall. Lothian and Strathclyde regional councils in Scotland had opened an office there. England’s metropolitan councils were frequent visitors as an indirect consequence of prime minister Thatcher taking vengeance against Greater London Council leader Ken Livingstone and other left-of-centre local authorities. (Sabena operated two or three daily scheduled services between Leeds Bradford airport and Brussels.) Those links provided the funds to electrify the East Coast Mainline between London and Scotland that London had denied, although it was never advertised on the signage.
Contact between Belfast, in Northern Ireland, and Dublin in the Republic, increased significantly. Out of sight of London, contacts and meetings slowly eased the way to the mutual understanding and trust that allowed the Good Friday Agreement between the UK and Republic to be signed nearly two decades later.
While the decision to cancel the Nightstar services looks typical of railway policy under Conservative prime minister John Major’s premiership between 1990 and 1997, the formal announcement came in July 1997, less than three months after Labour’s general election triumph and Tony Blair’s appointment as prime minister.
Expectations had been raised, with much publicity outside London – and then dashed. Although Labour was in office, the Conservatives had done damage that was unappreciated at the time but increased with hindsight.
That the long-distance services never appeared reinforced early scepticism of some Conservative attitudes towards Europe and the EU. The successful lobbying against the railway link did little to halt the distrust of Whitehall and Westminster that originated in the party’s Thatcherite policies of the 1980s. The North could see The Divide even if the South could not, or conveniently chose to deny it. Politically and logistically, getting round London became increasingly difficult as more and more governance was centralised.
During the Conservative years, London disempowered the UK’s nations, regions, counties and boroughs far, far more than Brussels ever disempowered the UK. The dishonest and hypocrisy went largely unnoticed and rarely mentioned by the London-based news media.
As they evolved, London’s ‘national’ newspapers withdrew resident reporters and correspondents from the capitals of Europe; xenophobic propaganda slowly replaced news as the influence of their proprietors remained unchecked. Coverage of the politics and minutiae of governance in Brussels never got due prominence, unless ‘Johnny Foreigner’ was being ridiculed. One graduate trainee for The Times (of London), renown for his ignorance of construction science when reporting plans for the renovation of the EU’s Berlaymont building in Brussels and proposals for directives to require the straightening of cucumbers, went on to be dismissed by the title for ‘fabricating’ a quotation.
That trainee – one Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, son of Stanley – went on to become prime minister of the UK. His news legacy was documented in the New York Times, days after the 2016 referendum over withdrawing from the EU by Martin Fletcher, his successor in Brussels.
Withdrawn services
Since the UK’s withdrawal from the EU, international stations Ashford and Ebsfleet in Kent have disappeared from departure information screens at Paris Gare du Nord station; trains no longer stop there because immigration and customs facilities are inadequate. Also, services cancelled during the coronavirus pandemic have never reappeared.
Avignon and Marseille are not on destination lists at St Pancras station in London as often as they were, for similar reasons. While passengers for Amsterdam can arrive without having to change trains, those wanting to get to London from the Netherlands must still go through passport control in Brussels.
Trains from Scotland and the North of England may only have carried miniscule proportions of their populations to and from ‘the continent’ but – for others using railway stations – hearing other languages and encountering visitors on the concourses and in the cafés would have helped make Europe and the EU less different and more familiar, without enhancing contempt.
Ironically, as the dire political and economic consequences of withdrawing from the EU become increasingly evident in the UK, demand for international rail services is growing, and not simply because awareness of the relative environmental impacts of rail, air and sea transport increases. Passenger numbers will continue to increase the pressure on facilities at St Pancras and the Gare du Nord that were never intended for today’s man-made time-wasting and disproportionately costly bureaucratic procedures.
Other operators are waiting to offer services that compete with Eurostar, but it is station, rather than track, capacity that could still thwart their ambitions. Ironically,
Perhaps in another 30 years, political pragmatism will have diluted dogma around borders and border checks sufficiently for more trains – with more passengers and from more distant destinations – to use the Channel Tunnel.
Night Trains; The Rise and Fall of the Sleeper, Andrew Martin, Profile Books, London, 2017.