Moreintelligentlife.com is the website of Intelligent Life magazine. Articles about Arts, Lifestyle, Travels, and Ideas

Twinkle, Twinkle, Eurostar

“CHUNNEL” might be a word in the dictionary, but
it’s colloquial usage never graduated beyond the generation that found it so
clever. English prefers taking nifty
hybrid terms from the streets, and in French, Chunnel sounds like a cheap
Chanel knockoff, not a grand engineering feat.
Today, the travelers who use the rail link between Paris and London
simply call it “Eurostar”.

Riding
through the longest undersea tunnel in the world makes me feel old because I
still find it so new and amazing. The
whole experience seems so Jules Vern-esque, especially the vague minutes of
darkness when passengers are informed that we are now travelling some
twenty-odd leagues under the sea. Yet
the artificial lighting shows off all that is dated about Eurostar: the colour scheme is tired, the stained
seats look tatty, and the formerly futuristic design now befits an amusement
park ride. Exiting in London reveals
painful dents on the front and side of the train, like the damaged hood of a
teenager’s car. Indeed, the Chunnel
opened thirteen years ago and my head must tick back through Mission Impossible
movies in order to remember the first one I saw as a teenager--the one where the
helicopter chases the train through the Chunnel.

On 14 November, Eurostar will leave Waterloo station for a new
international terminus at London’s St. Pancras Station. The revitalized station will be the
epicentre of modish, modern travel, so say the adverts. The transition is part of the new Railteam service, a fast
transportation network connecting London with major continental hubs. Christened High-speed Europe, the rail
system is a tad euphemistic (Italy, Portugal, and Spain are currently off the grid, as is
Scandinavia). The new trains will
travel at “European speeds” of 300kph and highlight how horrifically
slow and dysfunctional the rest of British rail actually is. Travel time from London to Paris will be cut
down to 2 hours 15 minutes, and taking the train from say--Birmingham to
Frankfurt--will become a viable alternative to flying.

Eurostar is just one of many trains that
will travel on this newer, faster track called High-Speed 1. Given the increase in number of
cross-channel destinations, the term “Eurostar” might vanish from our lexicon
completely. Travellers will merely take
the “high-speed” and the chunnel that makes it all possible will be taken for
granted--like Manhattan’s crowded Lincoln Tunnel or the Iron Bridge over Severn Gorge. For those of us who pine for slow-speed
Europe, ‘tis a wistful thought--almost a personal affront. Out with the old . . .