Ryanair for rail? Don't hold your breath

New 'budget trains' between Brussels and Paris give the illusion of competition, but in fact are designed to block new market entrants.

After 24 years in the making, today there is finally light at the end of the world's longest tunnel. Today in Switzerland the first train is passing through the monumental Gotthard Base Tunnel, carrying Germany's Angela Merkel, Italy's Matteo Renzi and France's Francois Hollande.

It will carry passengers between the German-speaking canton of Uri and the Italian-speaking canton of Ticino in an astonishing 16 minutes. It will cut the journey time between Zurich and Milan by one hour. 

Though you might expect a massive infrastructure project like this to be opposed by environmentalists, it was in fact welcomed. It will stop the daily journey of hundreds of trucks carrying goods over the Alps between Northern and Southern Europe, a journey which has been causing huge environmental damage.

It is part of the steady expansion of high-speed rail across Europe. Trains will be able to link up with Italy's impressive Frecciarossa trains, which whizz passengers from Milan to Naples in just four hours, at 360 km/h (224 m/h). New high-speed routes are coming online all over Europe.

Auf wiedersehen, sleeper trains

A leaked internal document reveals Deutsche Bahn may halt all sleeper train services in Germany at the end of next year.

If you like the idea of rolling across Europe in the relaxed comfort of your bed, it looks like you've got just one year left to do it - in Germany at least.

Deutsche Bahn, the German rail operator, has reportedly signalled that it may end all city night line trains in December 2016. No more overnight trains.

Eurotunnel Still Ablaze

I don't think it can be exagerated what a nightmare this fire in the Eurotunnel is causing for traffic, commerce and travel in the UK and France. Though when I went to bed yesterday the tunnel's operator was saying the fire had been extinguised, when I got up this morning I hear the fire is still burning. This does not look good for the long-term impact of the blaze.

The fire in the rail tunnel, which since 1994 has connected the UK and France running under the English Channel, was apparently caused by a truck/lorry overturning on one of the vehicle transport trains. Some injuries have been reported and hundreds of passengers have been left stranded. By some miracle, there were no passenger trains in the tunnel at the time of the blaze, amazing considering that 100 trains pass through the tunnel each day. The injured people were evacuated through the central service tunnel (the BBC has a cool diagram of how the chunnel works here).

1996, it took months to fix the structural damage to the tunnel. That caused enough cahos then, but since then the traffic through the tunnel has increased dramatically. If such a closure were to happen again for so long it would cause massive long-term chaos and an economic blow to Britain, the UK and Belgium.

Even more worrying, the overturned truck/lorry reportedly contained phenol, a deadly chemical that isn't allowed to be transported through the tunnel. The people who are reportedly in the hospital for smoke inhalation could have inhaled this chemical as it burned.

According to Wikipedia, the toxic chemical was used in the Second World War at Auschwitz as a means of rapid execution. Seeing as the fire happened on September 11th, there are some obvious concerned about whether this was truly an accident.

As someone who was planning to take the Eurostar train many times over the next several months, this is quite worrying. But for the economies of England and France in general, a shutdown of the tunnel for several months could be devastating. The majority of freight traffic between the UK and continental Europe now goes through the chunnel. In addition, the Eurotunnel just recently turned a profit for the first time, and there were big plans for expansion of the passenger services through it.

Just hours before the fire broke out yesterday, Air France announced it was launching its own high-speed train company through the tunnel which would take less than 2 hours, breaking the Eurostar monopoly. The journey currently takes a minimum of 2h 15m. Clearly there's a lot riding on the tunnel and its activity is only increasing. If anything were to go wrong with the tunnel at this crucial time it would have huge reverberations through France and Britain's economy.