Amsterdam and Rotterdam will lose their Eurostar connection for as long as 11 months starting next year due to renovation work on Amsterdam’s Centraal rail station, cutting their link to London until about May 2025. Currently, there are four trains a day in each direction.
Eurostar officials, as well as passenger rights groups, are furious about the situation; Eurostar service between the two capitals, which started five years ago, has long been seen as an environment-friendly way to reduce the dozens of daily flights that used to make the connection. Eurostar told Dutch press that “We calculate it means 21 extra flights between Schiphol and London and that is crying shame.”
The work at the station will take away space used for Eurostar’s passport checks and its baggage check area; because the UK is a member of neither the European Union or the Schengen free-travel area, passengers must go through immigration checks before boarding the train. Service to Rotterdam will also be lost because its security facility can’t handle enough passengers to make the service economically worthwhile.
Eventually, Eurostar will move from Centraal to Amsterdam Zuid station, which is being expanded to relieve congestion at Centraal, but that terminal won’t be ready before 2036.
In other Eurostar news, the company has ended its direct service between London and Disneyland Paris, as announced last year; yesterday’s train was the last, although the possibility was held out that service might resume for summer 2024, depending on a variety of factors, including determining what effect Europe’s new electronic entry/exit system, slated to start next year, has on Eurostar’s operations.
