Euro Star!

(Dear Readers – technology is everywhere. Yet I missed some postings last week because I was simply too busy travelling. He’s what I wrote on a yellow legal pad somewhere under the English Channel)

I probably took my first London – Paris trip in the autumn of 1974. Yikes! Was it really 34 years ago?

The journey would have begun at London’s Waterloo Station on the “boat train”. The train would have meandered through the Kent countryside to Dover – 2 hours and then another wait on the docks for the cross Channel ferry. From Calais on the French side to the Gare du Nord in Paris was at least three hours. If there was nasty weather on the English Channel ~ well ~ hopefully you were traveling with some wine. Truly, it was an all day journey and then some.

Today I’m zipping along on the "Euro-Star" fast speed service between Brussels and London. Take a guess on the duration? 7 hours? wrong. 5 hours? wrong, wrong, wrong again.

Two hours and five minutes from city center to city center. That’s right ~ two hours. And this ~ under the English Channel!

The Channel Tunnel ~ also known as Chunnel or Euro-tunnel ~ is a 31.5 mile undersea rail tunnel linking Britain to the Continent. Actual time beneath the Channel = 23 minutes. The scheme had been discussed for years but construction finally began in 1988. A French and English worker shook hands 200 feet beneath the seabed in December 1990 when the huge boring machines broke through (thankfully in the same place). Imagine that?

The first passenger and freight service began in 1994. However, it was the advent of the fast, very fast high speed trains in November 2007 that has brought about this lightning quick connection.

Forget the airplane. This is the new way to travel. Just enough time for a glass of wine.