Channel Tunnel trains set to run every 15 minutes as Virgin enters the route

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LONDON — High-speed trains linking the U.K. to the continent through the Channel Tunnel may soon depart every 15 minutes — thanks to competition from new operators on the route.

The number of daily services between London St Pancras and destinations like Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam is on track to rise from the 25 round trips currently operated by Eurostar each day to 55 by the end of the decade — around four departures per hour — according to POLITICO calculations.

The Channel Tunnel has been running under capacity since it opened in 1994 and infrastructure owners have long encouraged a “second operator” to challenge incumbent Eurostar on the rail line to the continent.

That idea seems to have finally left the station. Virgin Trains was last week given the green signal by the U.K. regulator to run up to 20 daily return trips between London, Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam, the first of several authorizations required for international trains. Virgin wants to begin the services in 2030.

Martin Jones, deputy director, access and international at the U.K.’s Office of Rail and Road (ORR), said the approval of Virgin’s track access rights was “an important next step in bringing competition and growth to the market for international rail services.”

But it looks increasingly likely that it won’t just be Virgin competing with Eurostar on the route to London.

Italian competition

Trenitalia, Italy’s state railway, is adamant it will be running services on the Channel route by 2029. It has promised 10 round trips a day, with operations starting from 2029.

The operator has put its money where its mouth is, this month placing a €2 billion order with manufacturer Hitachi for 19 new high-speed trains, some of which it says will be for use in the Channel Tunnel.

The state-owned company says it can stable the trains in France, at a new €80 million facility at Maisons-Alfort Pompadour, south of Paris. The depot is already under construction and will also be used to maintain rolling stock for its increasingly popular trains between Italy and France.

Using this new facility will allow Trenitalia to bypass capacity limits at the Temple Mills International depot in east London, where Eurostar keeps its fleet and where Virgin is also expected to do so. The U.K. regulator allocated the last space in the facility to Virgin last year.

Mark Smith, a former rail manager who runs the popular Man In Seat 61 travel website, told POLITICO: “Both contenders appear to have the ability and financial backing to make this happen, but there are many steps in a long process before any train runs. Trenitalia are in pole position with a 2029 start date, helped by having ordered trains of a type already approved for France and a continuation of an existing production line.”

“I see no reason why experience in Italy or Spain should not be repeated, where competition has raised standards, increased capacity and lowered average fares. The whole market has gown, in Italy Trenitalia is carrying more passengers than it did before competition from Italo arrived. Passengers have won, the biggest loser has been short haul flights.”

Reasons to be cautious

There’s still plenty of time for it all to go wrong — as it has before.

German state railway Deutsche Bahn once planned services through the tunnel, going so far as to send a promotional train to St Pancras for a photo op in October 2010. The operator was ultimately stymied by Brexit and backed away from the idea, although it has since shown some renewed interest.

There is also room for the new entrants to revise their plans. Operators don’t necessarily have to run every service they get authorization to operate from the ORR. Each operator also needs separate authorizations in each country and for the Channel Tunnel itself, meaning there are still regulatory hurdles to clear.

It also wouldn’t be the first (or even second) time a company brought trains to use in the Channel Tunnel and never ran them there. DB ended up using its ICE3 sets built for the tunnel to shore up reliability on other routes, including on the notoriously delay-prone route between Brussels and Germany.

Meanwhile, sleeper cars built to run never-realized Nightstar overnight services back in the 1990s are now running long-distance routes in Canada.

For now, all three new operators plan to compete on the existing routes and are yet to formally propose any new destinations — meaning Italy’s state railway would be running trains that go nowhere near Italy.

But this is increasingly common in Europe’s new age of liberalized railway competition, where national operators go wherever they see a gap in the market.

France’s state operator, for example, creams off lucrative domestic high-speed services in Spain, while Austria’s federal railways runs a sleeper between Germany and Switzerland.

Even before Brexit, adding new railway destinations from London was expensive and operationally difficult, thanks to the U.K.’s decision to remain outside the Schengen passport-free travel area.

This means that any station to be properly served from London needs expensive manned passport control, security checks, and a spare platform fenced off from others by a de facto international border. International and domestic passengers must be kept separate, too. These hurdles also make it commercially unviable to directly serve other destinations in the U.K. beyond London.

Piling in

Despite these challenges, the London route is deemed so lucrative that companies seem to be piling in.

Another would-be competitor, Gemini Trains, says it still wants to run 11 trains a day through the Tunnel by 2030 despite failing in its application for space at the Temple Mills depot. As of August 2026 Gemini is now looking at opening its own depot in Kent, on the site of a mothballed facility at Chart Leacon.

It has a partnership with global mobility giant Uber, but no trains, track access, nor yet a depot. If it is able to run its planned services, too, it would take the total number of cross Channel return services to 66 a day.

Eurostar has also announced plans to increase its own offering, and says a €2 billion (£1.7 billion) fleet of up to 50 new train sets will be delivered in the early 2030s, allowing a 30 percent increase in its own services and expansion to new destinations including Frankfurt and Geneva.

While the high-speed line on the U.K. side of the channel has plenty of spare capacity for all these plans — it was built with space for eight international trains an hour — whether they can come to fruition will also depend on capacity elsewhere. Train paths in France, Belgium and beyond will need to be secured.

Another major constraint will be passenger capacity at stations. In the international terminal at London St Pancras station terminal, there is already often nowhere to sit once through passport control. The station’s owner has commissioned architects Hawkins\Brown to fix this — with a brief to double passenger capacity there by 2028 and more expansions planned in the 2030s. St Pancras sits on a constrained site, sandwiched between neighboring King’s Cross station, the British Library, and a canal — limiting room for expansion.

Speaking last month, Gwendoline Cazenave, CEO of Eurostar, said the U.K. needed “a bold vision to match the private investment on the table.” She called for “more depot capacity, a bold expansion of St Pancras and a seamless border.”