A report on our Chunnel crossing

Somehow, in all my years of coming to Britain and France, I’ve never before taken the train from London to Paris or Paris to London.  (I’ve flown, I’ve done ferries, and I once took a hovercraft.  But no .)

This time, though, I did.  For various reasons, one of which was just to have done it.

The “Chunnel” (or “Channel Tunnel”) is a remarkable thing.  William the Conqueror would have adored it.  Napoleon and Hitler would have used it.  Except that Churchill would have dynamited it.

I had hoped that taking the train would be a vast improvement over flying.

I’m sad to say that I was disappointed.

The Eurostar train itself is very nice.  The crossing is painless and, in our experience on the English end (at St. Pancras Station), debarkation is entirely simple.  (It was certainly nice to have a hotel room waiting for us in the station itself.)  Internet connections in France and under the English Channel were usually very good.

On the English side, though, Internet connections were few and far between.

But that’s not the important thing.

Boarding the train at the Gare du Nord in Paris was a hot, chaotic, lengthy mess.  There was a lot of confusion and a lot of standing in lines, but, in the waiting areas, there were virtually no seats.  It was much worse than typical airport conditions — just the opposite of what I had hoped and, frankly, expected — and I can report on those conditions with some authority, having experienced them more times than I can possibly count, including just now.  (I’m sitting in an airport lounge at Heathrow, near London, awaiting a transatlantic flight.)  I realize that I seem to be whining, but, while I’m at it, I might as well lay it on really thick:  The Eurostar rooms were very hot, and, once we got into the waiting area, we wanted a cold drink.  You could buy water and sodas and etc. there, but they were all room temperature.  I didn’t get the impression that good customer service was a high priority at any point there at the Paris end.

Perhaps things are better going from London to Paris.  Perhaps yesterday was unusually bad.  Certainly Eurostar business class would be much better.  (I could observe that for myself.  Business class passengers have much shorter queues, when they have queues at all; they needn’t arrive so soon at the station; they have private waiting lounges.)  But I was looking forward to experiencing a less stressful way of getting from France to England, and this, alas, wasn’t it.

Posted from London, England