David Cantrell wrote:

On Sat, Mar 13, 2010 at 02:14:07PM +0000, Roland Perry wrote:

The other day I posted a list of ten separate destinations served in a
couple of hours from the much smaller airport, East Midlands.

You might delight everyone with 2tph to Paris, but what of the dozens of
other places they might want to be going instead?

Paris is an excellent place to change trains. But there's very little
point in running direct services from London to cities all over Europe -
the unavoidable constraint that high speed trains *must* pass through
Kent and the Channel Tunnel means that the only way to do that would be
to run lots of half-empty trains to lots of places, with none (or
perhaps just one) of them getting a frequent service.

How you looked at the figures for air travel? During August UK - rest of the
EU amounts to 25 Eurostar trains per hour, 24 hours a day.


Likewise, it's more
efficient to go from London to Copenhagen, Berlin, Warsaw, Prague,
Geneva, Pisa and Barcelona via a central hub: Paris.

Their is easily enough demand for a daily sleeper service, and distance is
long enough.

And consequently,
it's more efficient to offer service from Norwich or Newcastle to Prague
or Pisa via two hubs: London and Paris.

If the railways are to make a major dent in air travel, London and Paris
won't have enough capacity. LGV Nord-Europe might lack capacity for that.

Of course I suspect a restriction on air travel will be needed.