Published on : Saturday, March 8, 2014
Maybe 15 years late, but the Eurostar finally registered the 10-million passenger mark in 2013. Placing a tunnel beneath the English Channel, digging a tunnel and the massive engineering project ran behind schedule and went over the budget by the time it opened in 1994.
Not the smoothest operation since then, but 20 years later travelers now realizes how easy a high-speed train takes them from London to Paris. In a recent report Eurostar reported that it crossed the 10 million passenger mark last year.
In 1996, when the winning bidder submitted the forecast, the projected passenger traffic for the next ten years was quite hopeful. According to its assessment, Eurostar would carry 10 million passengers in 1998 and 25 million by 2006. It’s no wonder that, once the actual traffic patterns became clear, the companies involved faced financial restructuring, brushes with bankruptcy, and outright nationalization.
However, they say never too late for a good beginning. Today the tunnel does a roaring trade, relatively speaking, as the UK’s surprisingly strong economy has encouraged more business travellers to hop across the channel of late.
Tags: 10 million passengers, Eurostar
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