On 25 Mar, 14:24, Roland Perry wrote:

In message
, at
18:08:44 on Tue, 24 Mar 2009, remarked:

T5 has a pair of spare platforms, and it's the home of BA, who own
about 10% of Eurostar, so that's the obvious place to use.

BA own 10% of Eurostar UK. I don't know what proportion of the Eurostar
trains are operated by Eurostar UK (rather than the equivalent Belgian
and French companies), but all the ones I get to/from Brussels seem to
have French speaking crew.

BA emphatically does *not* own 10% of Eurostar UL Ltd (EUKL). EUKL is
100% owned by London & Continental Railways - LCR is itself not a
quoted company so there's no off-the-shelf source of information about
its shareholders, but BA is not one them - Bechtel, UBS, National
Express Group, EDF Energy and at least one if not more wholly owned
subsidiary company/companies of SNCF are amongst the shareholders.

BA is however a 10% shareholder in Inter-Continental and Regional Rail
- LCR has a contract with ICRR to manage the UK part of the Eurostar
operation, i.e. the British share of the tri-national effort. BA is
however a silent partner in this.

The whole issue of ownership and management of the Eurostar operation,
CTRL/HS1, LCR etc gets very muddled - more so when one considers that
courtesy of the massive loans that HM Government made available to
LCR, HM Government is basically capable of pulling the strings at LCR
(witness the proposed 'sell-off' of the three constituent parts of LCR
- EUKL, CTRL/HS1 and the property interests).

Things get even more interesting when one considers that the contract
LCR has with ICRR expires next year - it could be renewed, but it
seems there could *possibly* be some interesting scenarios with an
outside party - say DB - coming in and buying EUKL and then proceeding
to operate a new, separate international service which might then
precipitate the collapse of the tri-national Eurostar collaboration.
However I've no idea what binding commitments there are in treaties,
contracts and understandings, but the designated UK operator might be
compelled to work in concord with the French and Belgian railways in
providing a tri-national service (i.e. the Eurostar service). How this
plays out with EU competition rules is another question. And whether
DB would really consider it wise to come in and set themselves up
against SNCF is another matter still.