On Mar 17, 10:48 am, Dave A wrote:
Paul Terry wrote:
In message , Paul Corfield
writes

I cannot understand why anyone would fly to somewhere like Paris.

Well, I'm glad I'm not currently expecting to travel by Eurostar, given
the continuity of cancellations over the next 18 hours.

OK, I grant you that the current type of extended cancellation is
unusual, but I've often experienced delays. Despite long check-in times
at airports, the air-travel time is obviously much shorter, and
Eurostar's prices are often not very competitive.

I'm putting myself up as a bit of a stalking horse, because I actually
prefer rail travel, but I don't think Eurostar has yet managed.

But my main point is that as a resident of SW London, I have generally
used Eurostar from Waterloo because of its convenience.

Having watched all of the expenditure on the new route into St Pancras,
I cannot help but reflect that few such expensive schemes could also
have resulted in potentially less convenience for a significant slice of
its customers (like it or not, SW London is full of rich folks jaunting
off to France, civil servants going on "a jolly" to Brussels, and city
businessmen needing to go to Paris). Many of these folk live closer to
Heathrow than St Pancras - time spent selecting the right tie and
sandwiches for trip, and doing a bit of telephoning and paperwork in the
departure lounge, might well seem more appealing than being jammed into
the Piccadilly line across London.

From a pure-numbers point of view, there are more people within an
hour's journey of St Pancras than there are within an hour of Waterloo.
Throwing Stratford into the mix (if they actually use it!) boosts this
considerably. The Thameslink Programme will get even more people
connected to St Pancras (including from some bits of south west London
and Surrey), and Crossrail would also place a lot of extra people closer
to St Pancras (via Farringdon).

Isn't crossrail going to Stratford too?