Eurostar is expanding network: Belgium is connected to Geneva
© AFP
The Eurostar network is expanding within a few years with two new destinations: the Swiss Stad Geneva and Frankfurt in Germany. That is what HST manager Eurostar, who is partly in the hands of the Belgian railway company NMBS, announced on Tuesday. For the first time, Belgium will be directly connected to Switzerland per high -speed train.
Source: Belga
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The extra destinations are expected to be « early 2030 », when Eurostar expects to hire up to fifty new trains. The new destinations will be good for three new routes. The first of them is Amsterdam/Brussels – Geneva. The ride between Brussels and Switzerland would last 4 hours and 20 minutes and be performed three times a day, says Eurostar.
In addition, Eurostar will also have traces between London and Geneva (via France), and between London and Frankfurt. The latter route runs via Brussels, although it is not yet certain that the trains will also stop there. « It is still too early to talk about the stops on the way, » says Eurostar spokeswoman Cordula Descheemaeker. « We are at the start of the project and we look at it. »
There are already high -speed trains between Brussels and Frankfurt, but those are ICEs and not Eurostars. The latter are already driving between Brussels and other German cities, such as Cologne, Düsseldorf and Dortmund.
Eurostar announced a year ago that it will invest around 2 billion euros in up to fifty new trains, to increase the number of trains by 30 percent to a fleet of 67 trains. That contract has not yet been granted; The negotiations with interested train builders are still ongoing.
« With the new fleet we provide extra capacity on our routes, on some thanks to extra frequencies and on others with the same frequencies but higher capacity on the train, » says the spokeswoman. The second is the case for, for example, the Brussels-Paris connection. So there will be no extra journeys, but it is expected that the new trains can transport more travelers.
30 million travelers
The high -speed trains of Eurostar are currently running in Belgium, the Netherlands, France, the United Kingdom and Germany. The most popular route is that between London and Paris.
Eurostar transported 19.5 million passengers last year: 5 percent more than a year earlier and a record. Turnover rose 2 percent to 2 billion euros, while the EBITDA profit (profit for interest, taxes, depreciation and depreciation) was 346 million euros. The HST operator has the ambition to grow to 30 million travelers by 2030.
Several other companies have recently said that they are investigating the possibility of having trains run through the Channel Tunnel. Eurostar is currently the only one who transports passengers through the tunnel to London.
