Eurostar forced to stop running London-Amsterdam trains for almost a year in 2024

On the day on which Eurostar’s final Disneyland Paris train from London departs, it has emerged that the cross-Channel rail company could be forced to stop running trains from London to both Rotterdam and Amsterdam for almost a year because of work being carried out on the station in the Dutch capital.

Unless a solution can be found, it will see the Eurostar network reduced from a pre-Brexit total of 13 year-round stations to just four: London, Lille, Paris and Brussels.

At 10.34am on Monday, the final Eurostar “Disneyland Express” will depart from London St Pancras International. The direct high-speed rail link to the heart of the theme park east of Paris has been running since 1996, except for a pause during the Covid crisis.

But Eurostar is now ending the service because of extra red tape brought in as a result of Brexit. The UK government negotiated for British passport holders to become “third-country nationals” – with a hard European Union frontier installed at St Pancras station for outbound passengers.

The design of the Eurostar London terminal never envisaged that checks would involve stamping passports – and, from next year, taking fingerprints and facial biometrics from UK travellers to the EU. These checks vastly increase the time taken for each passenger, and therefore the space needed.

Eurostar is capping passenger numbers on trains because of the sheer physical constraints of its terminals.

The extra bureaucracy arising from the decision to leave the European Union has led to the continued closure of two stations in Kent: Ebbsfleet and Ashford International. They shut down as the Covid pandemic took hold, but Eurostar will not reopen them until 2025 at the earliest – after the planned entry-exit system for the EU is implemented.

The direct train from London St Pancras to Lyon, Avignon and Marseille has been dropped. Calais-Frethun station, serving the French port, is also mothballed.

Mark Smith, the international rail expert known as The Man in Seat 61, called the ending of the Disneyland Paris link “another Brexit ‘benefit’ along with dropping calls at Ashford and Ebbsfleet”.

He said: “With increased border checks and consequently reduced terminal capacity, Eurostar are doubling down on their core routes until the full effects of the new EU Entry/Exit System are…