First UIC freight train to london

According to this week's Rail magazine DB Schenker (the main freight company after they bought EWS) will send a full size train of swap bodies from Poland to Barking, to arrive on 11 November. No mention of the cargo or the originating station in Poland.

At last HS1 will see some freight for which it was designed. Presumably the train will arrive before the day's first Eurostar and the first domestic high speed trains.

that train sure was a long time coming . when was the chunnel opened , mid nineties ????

David Benton wrote:that train sure was a long time coming . when was the chunnel opened , mid nineties ????

Endless negotiations. HS1 will be useful for freight at night to a terminal in East London at Barking. I don't know what is supposed to happen there. Will it just be transferred to lorries? Or to British loading gauge trains?

First it had to wait for the HS1 line. Thatcher refused to authorise it as she thought the whole Eurotunnel should be paid for by the private sector. She didn't really want a rail tunnel at all but was advised that a drive-through tunnel wasn't possible. Even so the Treaty included a clause that Eurotunnel should research a drive through tunnel for later. I suspect they reported it wasn't feasible. So the tunnel opened without a high speed link and the Eurostar trains trundled through the Kent countryside on the third rail network until they got to the tunnel and noticeably speeded up. But rail freight was much less than estimated at the beginning. It all had to go on British loading gauge trains.

It took the Labour government in 1997 to get HS1 built and that wasn't finished until quite recently. Now we have the terminal in Barking. Will there be a European loading gauge line beyond that? Possibly if HS2 is built but that is probably decades away, so Barking will be the terminal for a long time.

The illegal immigrant problem was devastating to railfreight through the tunnel. Both the damage to tarps covering loads as they tried to hide from UK Border Patrol. And then the UK Government's attempt to fine EW&S for each illegal who managed to gain entry, even though EW&S could do little until the French first installed heavier fencing around the refuge camp near the French Portal of the Chunnel, and eventually moved the camp.

The first trains using HS1 will be almost all Intermodal including the MegaBox containers.

JayBee wrote:The illegal immigrant problem was devastating to railfreight through the tunnel. Both the damage to tarps covering loads as they tried to hide from UK Border Patrol. And then the UK Government's attempt to fine EW&S for each illegal who managed to gain entry, even though EW&S could do little until the French first installed heavier fencing around the refuge camp near the French Portal of the Chunnel, and eventually moved the camp.

I vaguely remembered reading about this back then, and so I just did a search on old articles archives - even back then the media was calling the situation bizarre, that EWS was doing all it was required to and could do given the situation, and that the UK government was simply lying thru it's teeth.
The French government (and SNCF) had very poor security at the French freight terminal, and so illegal immigrants would basically climb onto the UK-bound trains with little to stop them. SNCF was in charge of the terminal, EWS seems to have had no control in the situation, no matter how much they protested.
The trains would come thru to the Chunnel to the EWS terminal, where they would be scanned and the illegal immigrants detained and delivered to British authorities - but then it becomes absurd, as EWS was fined GBP2000 for each immigrant they found by following the law (sounds like they should have just let the immigrants sneak away). The articles sort of end with cross-channel freight business in a shambles, EWS (rightfully) refusing to pay the fines and suing the government, and the UK government making contradictory and incorrect statements about the whole matter.
How was this issue with the fines resolved, and why was the government so insistant on imposing them in the first place - I could not get this from the article archives I checked?

I remember reading about that at the time as well, but I never heard how or whether the fines were resolved. A major reason for lack of cooperation from the French in keeping immigrants off the trains was that the French found it as good a way as any to get rid of the immigrants and let them be Britain's problem. There was much suspicion at the time that the French were merely looking the other way.

http://www.eurotunnelgroup.com/uploaded ... HS1-UK.pdf

Eurotunnel own Europorte, indeed created this company. This freight company operates in France as well as Britain.

They also own GB Railfreight when they bought the company, which was a start-up by one of the franchising companies.

Europorte Channel can now use its 11 Class 92s throughout the UK network and through the
Channel Tunnel, meaning that there is only one locomotive change necessary when arriving in
France, where the Class 92s are still unauthorised.

I think there needs to be a locomotive at each end of a freight train.