Constant traffic growth
With 9.2 million passengers* carried in 2009, Eurostar beat the record number set the previous year by an additional 100,000.
As Eurotunnel’s leading customer in terms of both the volume of traffic and the amount of revenues generated, Eurostar offers a high-speed rail service putting central London within 2 hours 15 minutes of the Gare du Nord in Paris, 1 hour 20 minutes of Lille and 1 hour 51 minutes of Brussels. The 2nd section of the British high-speed line “HS1” was brought into service in November 2007, making it possible to achieve these outstanding performances.
In London, the new St-Pancras International station is located next to King’s Cross Station and to Euston station. These 2 stations serve the whole of Northern England. This easy connection is attracting a new customer base, from outside the Greater London region.
Another new station on the British high-speed line, Ebbsfleet station in Kent, is located next to the M25. It is as easy to access by car as Gatwick Airport (South of London) or Stansted Airport (North-East of London).
Very buoyant leisure market
Over the full year, the number of people carried increased by 1.2%. This result has primarily been achieved thanks to the leisure traffic, surging 16%, while the business travel segment, which saw a sharp drop over the 1st half of the year, benefited from positive signs of recovery during the last 6 months.
* Includes only those Eurotunnel passengers who travel via the Channel Tunnel, and excludes the routes Paris-Calais and Brussels-Lille.
To find out more, please read pages 44/45 of the 2009 Annual review of Groupe Eurotunnel.
Despite the economic recession, cross-Channel rail freight traffic got back on track for growth in the 2nd half of 2009, supported by Eurotunnel’s pricing policy and the implementation of a range of innovative solutions.
Resurgence of rail freight
The good level of resilience to the contraction of the rail freight market, in a difficult general climate, confirms that the strategy implemented by Eurotunnel since 2007 established the conditions in which the traffic could be relaunched. Moves to introduce a single and simplified pricing structure, per train and n o longer variable per tonne, to cap cross-Channel services and to cut the overall cost for the customer by nearly half, have started to pay off.
Refrigerated trains
Long-distance rail freight has long been affected by the splitting of responsibilities between national or even regional operators in terms of monitoring goods trains. With the policy for open access to the infrastructure, it is becoming possible for a single operator to have end to end control on international rail freight traffic. Such a procedure was put in place in March 2009 for refrigerated container traffic.
Opening up this market by creating the conditions for the high level of quality required for the strong development of rail freight has enabled operators to sign new contracts, underlining the potential for development. Since the end of October 2009, the international haulier, Stobart group, has been chartering a goods train each week made up exclusively of 30 refrigerated containers carrying fresh fruit and vegetables from Murcia and Valencia in Spain to Dagenham, eat of London, via the Channel Tunnel.
To know more on the rail freight business, please read pages 46/47 of the 2009 Annual review of Groupe Eurotunnel.