News

The Prosser Perspective.... a weekly column from Dover and Deal MP Gwyn Prosser

30 August 2007

Last weekend the first of the 29 high speed Hitachi trains that will run between London and Dover and other Kent coastal towns arrived in Southampton and is now preparing for its first journey on the UK rail system to the special testing depot in Ashford.

The struggle to extend the CTRL domestic trains to East Kent was a hard one and convincing the Strategic Rail Authority, the train operator and the Government that the link should be extended through the Shakespeare Tunnels to Dover was even more difficult but the successful result was well worth the struggle.

By the end of this year the CTRL Class 373 trains will be running from London St Pancras and Ebbsfleet to the Continent and by the end of 2009 the new Hitachi 395 trains will be speeding us safely from Dover to London in not much more than an hours journey time.

It’s worth remembering that the whole of the high speed train project would have collapsed were it not for the intervention of the newly installed Labour Government that – way back in 1999 – rescued the scheme after eleven years of political and financial turmoil threatened to run it into the buffers.

Unfortunately the gloss has been taken off all the high speed news by Eurostar’s decision to reduce their services from Ashford International Station when Ebbsfleet opens on 19th November. Richard Brown, the Chief Executive of Eurostar calls this reduction “the Company’s decision to rebalance the stopping pattern of trains in Kent” I call it the slashing of services to Paris and the axing of all the Ashford to Brussels trains.

I explained in an earlier article how such cuts will impact on regeneration and growth in East Kent and Sussex and why I was part of a cross party campaigning group of MPs who are pressing the Company for a re-think. Since presenting our 15,000 strong petition to Eurostar, similar representations have been made to No10, I’ve met and raised my objections with the Chief Executive and a small group of us have sat down with the Transport Minister, Tom Harris and his officials seeking intervention.

The sad reality is that in today’s privatised railway system, Government has little influence over the conduct of the UK franchisees and next to no influence over international operators like Eurostar but the Minister did agree to urge the Company to retain one daily service to Paris as a means of testing the robustness of their analysis.

We have maintained considerable pressure on the Company to rethink their plans and I’m told that they feel as if they’ve been under siege for the last six months but our efforts have failed to alter their stance.

In his written response to the Transport Minister, Richard Brown dismisses our call for compromise but says that after the change-over Eurostar will monitor the effect of the changes on people’s travel arrangements – but how do you monitor a service that no longer exists ?