STP-BRU Eurostar – Standard

Operator: Eurostar

Headcode: 9I16

Route:    STP-BRU

Class:    Standard

Seat:     C9 S51

Date:     Friday 6^th January 2023

January means one thing for Flights and Times, a big trip spread over a few days that I wouldn’t get chance to do at other times. Unfortunately, owing to Covid, this didn’t happen in 2021 but last year saw me exploring Budapest, Bratislava and Prague as I started to travel again. For 2023’s trip I decided to do something a little bit different and so was born (Not Quite) All The Small Things, where I aimed to visit a number of Europe’s smaller countries, all whilst relying on the European rail and bus networks.

Obviously the trip happened, as otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this blog, and so to launch this series of 15 posts here’s a report on my journey with Eurostar that kicked off the trip as I travelled from London St Pancras to Brussels Midi. Owing to various rail strikes in Britain, I had made my way down to London the night before and so my day started with a tube ride on the Northern line which brought me out across the road at London King’s Cross.

With the ongoing rail strikes, the first few Eurostar services of the day had been retimed to depart after the railway ‘re-opened’ at 0700 and so I had deliberately not arrive at St Pancras too early to avoid the four trains worth of passengers waiting in the departure lounge. As it was, check-in for my 0901 departure wasn’t quite open when I arrived and so I had a short wait in the main concourse at St Pancras before the journey could begin.

Getting from the main concourse to the Eurostar departure lounge is a three stage process, with an automated ticket check, security and finally passport control. Security is much easier than at airports, there’s no need to remove items from your bags and there’s no limits to the liquids you can bring through. Essentially you empty your pockets and go through the metal detector whilst everything else gets x-rayed. On my previous journey with Eurostar from St Pancras (read about that here) the delay in this process had been passport control with the e-gates having issues, however there were no issues this time round and the entire process from scanning my ticket to getting into the departure lounge took just 15-minutes.

As predicted, the departure lounge was especially busy, having had about five train loads of passengers until just before my arrival. Thankfully, after the last two of the ‘early’ trains (the 0801 Paris and 0816 Amsterdam) departed, the lounge cleared out drastically and I managed to time my wait for coffee perfectly to get a seat as one opened up. Choices for refreshments are fairly limited once you’ve made your way through to the Eurostar departure lounge with only a Pret and ‘The Station Pantry’ available.

Having opted for the latter, I ended up spending just over £10 for a coffee, a pastry and a granola yoghurt, with the coffee itself costing around the £4 mark. Unfortunately, with a captive market, the Eurostar departure lounge is very much like any airport departure lounge when it comes to finding a reasonably priced coffee. With my success at getting a seat with a table, I was able to get a bit of writing done whilst waiting for boarding to start, something that occurred about 20 minutes before departure.

Having utilised Real Time Trains to establish what platform we would be departing from, I was able to position myself to be the first person up the travellator, getting a good view of the Eurostar class 374 E320 that would be taking us across to Belgium. My seat for the journey was seat 51 in coach 9, just over halfway down the 16-coach train, and this one was of a pair of ‘airline’ style seating as opposed to one of a group at a table.

Having settled down to catch up on a couple of episodes of The Crown, most of our journey across south-east England passed me by and before I realised where we were, we were slowing down to enter the Channel Tunnel. Whilst Eurostar services operate at speeds of up to 320kph, the trains are required to slow down to 160kph to pass through the tunnel, resulting in what feels like quite sharp braking as services approach the tunnel portal. Even with the reduced speed, it only takes about 20 minutes to pass through the tunnel, with about an hour passing between departure from St Pancras and exiting the tunnel in France.

Generally, the only stop between London and Brussels is the French station of Lille Europe. As the city of Lille’s high-speed station, Lille Europe is served by Eurostar services along with TGV and Thalys services between Paris, Belgium and The Netherlands along with some domestic TGV services that start or terminate in the city.

Due to the desire to have the high-speed station centrally located whilst also not destroying part of the city to build it, Lille Europe is mostly located underground and is very much a cave. Unfortunately, this means there are limited views of the city on the approach to Lille, and the views whilst stopped at the station are at best of a TGV or Thalys service on an adjacent platform.

With a planned journey time of just two hours and five minutes, it was not long before we were crossing the French/Belgian border and then passing through the suburbs of Brussels. The approach to Brussels-Midi is a highlight of the journey as the large, raised viaduct provides excellent views of the city’s skyline. We arrived into platform 1 at Brussels-Midi at 1206, just one minute late, quite impressive for a service that travels across four differing railway systems (English, Channel Tunnel, French and Belgian).

With border formalities having been completed prior to departure in London, arriving into Brussels was a fairly simple process with just customs to pass through. Unfortunately, this process took longer than it should owing to the quite narrow platform and the escalators on the other side being out of order. As such it took about 15-minutes from the train arriving before I was able to make it down to the station’s main concourse ready for my next journey.

As with my previous Eurostar journeys I was impressed by the simplicity and speed of the process of travelling by train to Europe. From leaving my hotel room to arriving into Brussels it was about three and a half hours, a timeframe that I’d unlikely to be able to make if I had flown. With more space in a standard seat than most short-haul aircraft, similar prices and it being a much greener option, why would you not use Eurostar?

Lounge              0*

Seat/Facilities     4*

Food               3*

Service             5*

Punctuality         5*

Overall Rating      17/25 (read about my rating system here!)