I was lucky to be invited along to see the ICE in London St Pancras on Tuesday 19th October 2010, had a good look around the train and was very impressed, I look forward to travelling from London to Frankfurt etc by ICE from 2012/2013.
thank you for the pictures! I'm a little bit surprised to see a "continental" train at St. Pancras. Of cource I did know that High Speed One has been built to UIC standards, but I expected the platforms at St. Pancras to fit to the smaller Eurostar and therefore to be unsuitable for the broader ICE.
I guess the high speed line is UIC loading gauge all the way to the buffer stop. They probably rebuilt St. Pancras with that in mind. Presumably not a single sleeper had been left in place.
Roland Ziegler hat geschrieben:I guess the high speed line is UIC loading gauge all the way to the buffer stop.
Probably. But what happens to the passengers of smaller carriages (Eurostar!) which comply to British standards? Do they fall into the "Please mind the gap"?
St Pancras International platforms are built to UIC gauge as is the whole of the HS1 line.
The ICE train was hauled by locomotive from the tunnel to St Pancras, not sure why.
Christian the Eurostars have a big step that comes down and out so you wont fall down the gap :-)
A good think will be that the ICE Frankfurt-London stops in LILLE EUROPE because Lille is an important metropole in the North of France, but at the present time without direct connection to Liège, Aachen or Cologne (the Thalys do not stop in Lille Europe). Lille and the North of France will of course benefit from a stop of the ICE in Lille Europe, such as Liège, Aachen, Cologne and Frankfurt.
Another stop of the ICE in CALAIS-FRETHUN will be interesting for Belgian or German people who want to go on holidays on the Opal Coast for a short time, for example for the week-end : it will be economically good for the Opal Coast region and this stop will be interesting too for people who live in Calais, Dunkerque, Le Touquet and Boulogne sur mer : they will be direct connected to Belgium and Germany!