Traffic chaos in Kent

Dansk_Red said:

France is resisting efforts to increase daily Eurostar services in a fresh twist to a row between border guards and travel companies that last week tipped millions of summer holidays into chaos.

In a dispute that will draw parallels with a row that brought Dover to standstill on Friday, border officials in Paris are at loggerheads with the Channel Tunnel train operator over its plans to add to the number of trains running between London and Paris every day.

Eurostar, whose future was put in doubt last year in a funding row between France and the UK, is understood to be pushing to increase the number of services between the two capitals to 17 a day.

City sources said that the desire to ramp up services was in part to honour commitments contained in leasing agreements for Eurostar’s fleet of Velaro trains, built by Siemens at a cost of €600m (£510m).

Failure to hit this frequency could cause financial issues with honouring lease payments in the fullness of time, sources said. However, they said that there was no suggestion of an immediate threat to the company.

French border and security officials at Gare du Nord are understood to be insisting that they can only cope with a maximum of 13 trains a day, causing a significant headache for Eurostar bosses and hurting hopes of capturing a boom in demand for overseas travel this summer.

An extra four services would allow thousands more people to travel to the Continent every day, easing pressure on ferries and airlines after passengers suffered a wave of flight cancellations and hours-long traffic jams around Dover.

Eurostar wants to run 17 trains between London and Paris per day - CHRISTOPHE PETIT TESSON/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

France is resisting efforts to increase daily Eurostar services in a fresh twist to a row between border guards and travel companies that last week tipped millions of summer holidays into chaos.

In a dispute that will draw parallels with a row that brought Dover to standstill on Friday, border officials in Paris are at loggerheads with the Channel Tunnel train operator over its plans to add to the number of trains running between London and Paris every day.

Eurostar, whose future was put in doubt last year in a funding row between France and the UK, is understood to be pushing to increase the number of services between the two capitals to 17 a day.

City sources said that the desire to ramp up services was in part to honour commitments contained in leasing agreements for Eurostar’s fleet of Velaro trains, built by Siemens at a cost of €600m (£510m).

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Failure to hit this frequency could cause financial issues with honouring lease payments in the fullness of time, sources said. However, they said that there was no suggestion of an immediate threat to the company.

French border and security officials at Gare du Nord are understood to be insisting that they can only cope with a maximum of 13 trains a day, causing a significant headache for Eurostar bosses and hurting hopes of capturing a boom in demand for overseas travel this summer.

An extra four services would allow thousands more people to travel to the Continent every day, easing pressure on ferries and airlines after passengers suffered a wave of flight cancellations and hours-long traffic jams around Dover.

Frustrated holidaymakers queued for hours to board ferries at Dover on 22 July - Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg

Eurostar ran around 25 services each day prior to the pandemic, including to destinations such as Brussels and Amsterdam as well as Paris.

French border police and security scanning personnel claim that they are suffering from chronic staffing shortages and cannot handle more train services, sources said.

One said: “It's in no-one's interest to upset the apple cart. Getting on top of the post-pandemic surge in demand requires goodwill and collaboration on all sides.”

On Friday, border officials from Police Aux Frontières (PAF) sparked chaos at Dover amid claims that staff failed to turn up to work.

Weirdly The Telegraph have published that piece without a single mention of the "B" word and the role it's self evidently played in the chaos of last week. 

Lordflashheart said:

Client of mine was at Paris airport - queue for British passport holders was very long, and the French were being deliberately slow - he holds dual nationality, so used his Lebanese passport to go through a different booth - in his view they are doing it deliberately because they are annoyed about Brexit

Mind you, the French have form for being ignorant and having short memories - in 1966 De Gaulle ordered all US troops to leave France - Dean Rusk (US Secretary of State) replied ‘does that include the 60,000 dead ones in cemeteries’

Indeed when I was in bayeux last month on the war visit, restaurant owners twice told me they were full when there were empty unreserved tables, only to go down the queue and cherry pick French citizens out to sit.

Why I dont work there anymore and certainly wouldn't holiday there. But had to pay my respects to those that fell so those owners could be racist and ignorant.

To be fair they havent vandalised the cemeteries yet. 

Dansk_Red said:

France is resisting efforts to increase daily Eurostar services in a fresh twist to a row between border guards and travel companies that last week tipped millions of summer holidays into chaos.

In a dispute that will draw parallels with a row that brought Dover to standstill on Friday, border officials in Paris are at loggerheads with the Channel Tunnel train operator over its plans to add to the number of trains running between London and Paris every day.

Eurostar, whose future was put in doubt last year in a funding row between France and the UK, is understood to be pushing to increase the number of services between the two capitals to 17 a day.

City sources said that the desire to ramp up services was in part to honour commitments contained in leasing agreements for Eurostar’s fleet of Velaro trains, built by Siemens at a cost of €600m (£510m).

Failure to hit this frequency could cause financial issues with honouring lease payments in the fullness of time, sources said. However, they said that there was no suggestion of an immediate threat to the company.

French border and security officials at Gare du Nord are understood to be insisting that they can only cope with a maximum of 13 trains a day, causing a significant headache for Eurostar bosses and hurting hopes of capturing a boom in demand for overseas travel this summer.

An extra four services would allow thousands more people to travel to the Continent every day, easing pressure on ferries and airlines after passengers suffered a wave of flight cancellations and hours-long traffic jams around Dover.

Eurostar wants to run 17 trains between London and Paris per day - CHRISTOPHE PETIT TESSON/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

France is resisting efforts to increase daily Eurostar services in a fresh twist to a row between border guards and travel companies that last week tipped millions of summer holidays into chaos.

In a dispute that will draw parallels with a row that brought Dover to standstill on Friday, border officials in Paris are at loggerheads with the Channel Tunnel train operator over its plans to add to the number of trains running between London and Paris every day.

Eurostar, whose future was put in doubt last year in a funding row between France and the UK, is understood to be pushing to increase the number of services between the two capitals to 17 a day.

City sources said that the desire to ramp up services was in part to honour commitments contained in leasing agreements for Eurostar’s fleet of Velaro trains, built by Siemens at a cost of €600m (£510m).

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Failure to hit this frequency could cause financial issues with honouring lease payments in the fullness of time, sources said. However, they said that there was no suggestion of an immediate threat to the company.

French border and security officials at Gare du Nord are understood to be insisting that they can only cope with a maximum of 13 trains a day, causing a significant headache for Eurostar bosses and hurting hopes of capturing a boom in demand for overseas travel this summer.

An extra four services would allow thousands more people to travel to the Continent every day, easing pressure on ferries and airlines after passengers suffered a wave of flight cancellations and hours-long traffic jams around Dover.

Frustrated holidaymakers queued for hours to board ferries at Dover on 22 July - Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg

Eurostar ran around 25 services each day prior to the pandemic, including to destinations such as Brussels and Amsterdam as well as Paris.

French border police and security scanning personnel claim that they are suffering from chronic staffing shortages and cannot handle more train services, sources said.

One said: “It's in no-one's interest to upset the apple cart. Getting on top of the post-pandemic surge in demand requires goodwill and collaboration on all sides.”

On Friday, border officials from Police Aux Frontières (PAF) sparked chaos at Dover amid claims that staff failed to turn up to work.

Eurostar Group is a holding company founded by SNCF Voyageurs, Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, SNCB, and Federated Hermes Infrastructure in 2022. It aims at merging the operations of Thalys and Eurostar high-speed rail services between France, United Kingdom, Belgium, Netherlands, and Germany.[1]

Eurostar is owned by the state owned French Railways and financed by American and Canadian investment funds.

Nothing to do with "us" any more - so not our problem! We certainly have no influence over how many trains the French want to run!

But if we blame the French then we haven't taken back control 

Need some grown ups from both sides to sit down and sort it out as it does neither any favours and potentially harms future tourism.

My faith in politicians to resolve matters is at an all time low as all they ever seem to do (both parties) is play the blame game and shoot themselves in the foot.

How the hell can we ever hope to work together to combat climate change when we can't resolve, in global terms, some relatively minor local difficulties.

This is clearly a consequence of Brexit but one which could have been mitigated. I went across the channel via Euro Tunnel 8 weeks ago. It took a few minutes as opposed to a few seconds or no seconds to go through the French customs/border control, which is on the British side. We were fine with that, no problem at all. Drove off the train on time and on our way.

When you have to take time with every car though, you need more booths for when things are busy. In the same way as congestion on a motorawy has a knock on effect down the miles. You need a lot more booths as it was definitely a measure to let a lot of cars just pass through in busy periods before and you need to compensate for no longer having that opyion. But these will only be needed in busy periods and that is a logistical issue to solve. Why does the port and indeed Eurotunnel have the same facilities as before? Surely somebody could have looked at it and said how do we solve this and it would be easy to solve and in the way of things, probably not that expensive and if the French didn't want to pay for it, we could with an undertaking they provided the number of customs staff.

Throwing insults and blame at the French will not help this of course. And some people on here that think this is the answer have no wish to travel to France so they don't care. Not their problem. So their views or solutions shouldn't matter. But i'm sure a lot of reasonable people can see that this is more a logistical cock up that could have been solved even after Brexit.  

golfaddick said:

ME14addick said:

We often park our car in the White Cliffs National Trust car park and sit on the grassy slopes above Dover's eastern dock watching the movements within the port.  There are a huge number of ferries going in and out each day.

boy, you do know how to have fun 

Sounds a bit like potential dogging Sorry!

ME14addick said:

golfaddick said:

ME14addick said:

We often park our car in the White Cliffs National Trust car park and sit on the grassy slopes above Dover's eastern dock watching the movements within the port.  There are a huge number of ferries going in and out each day.

boy, you do know how to have fun 

It's actually very interesting and a good place for a picnic officer

Lordflashheart said:

Chippycafc said:

Lordflashheart said:

Client of mine was at Paris airport - queue for British passport holders was very long, and the French were being deliberately slow - he holds dual nationality, so used his Lebanese passport to go through a different booth - in his view they are doing it deliberately because they are annoyed about Brexit

Mind you, the French have form for being ignorant and having short memories - in 1966 De Gaulle ordered all US troops to leave France - Dean Rusk (US Secretary of State) replied ‘does that include the 60,000 dead ones in cemeteries’

Indeed when I was in bayeux last month on the war visit, restaurant owners twice told me they were full when there were empty unreserved tables, only to go down the queue and cherry pick French citizens out to sit.

Why I dont work there anymore and certainly wouldn't holiday there. But had to pay my respects to those that fell so those owners could be racist and ignorant.

To be fair they havent vandalised the cemeteries yet. 

I remember when I was about 10, we went on camping holiday to France - went on a toll motorway, and it was evident that we were lost (1980 so pre satnav etc - Dad driving, Mum map reading) - got to a toll booth, and Mum (who was of course on the side of the car where the toll booth man was) tried in her limited school learned French, to explain where we were trying to get to - this bloke just stared at her, and let her struggle to say what she wanted to say - once she finished, she turned to Dad and said that we would have to try somewhere else, as she couldn’t explain things to the bloke, and he clearly didn’t speak English - bloke in toll booth then announces that he speaks perfect English, but he would not help us, as there was a queue of cars behind us now - my Mum had grab Dad’s arm and stop him getting out of the car to whack the bloke - Dad was incensed that the bloke had been such a tosser, and effectively belittled Mum 

We didn’t holiday in France after that trip !!

They even had the ‘ump back then with the Brexit vote! Bloody frogs!

Essentially been a hostage to this nonsense in Hythe since Friday, We apparently have the issue of some 'politicians'  now proposing lorry parks, and utilising Manston airport, which was always available, but the resilience forum, and others refused to consider this, several months ago. That alone will not solve the issue, as in the opinion of many it will need a holding bay before Maidstone, and and for the private companies that operate Eurotunnel , and the Ferry operators to draw up plans to facilitate, this with KCC, and Highways England, and pay for it! 

Having had a new knee cap three weeks ago, I am still recovering from mobility issues, I hope to be driven up to Bexley tommorow, and probably face the A20 on the way home.
This needs to be sorted out ASAP, to me there is not one thing that can be done, but a number of things that need to be implemented, and that will take years to come on stream in my opinion.
In the meantime the village roads of Kent are screwed!, and hard luck the residents.

All this after 6 years of poor management, and a lack of vision.
Blaming the French is a pointless exercise, we need our so called 'leaders' to come out with proposals which stops the M20 being lorry park, the one intention it claimed not to want to do!. 

Why any poor HGV driver would want to come to the UK and face this nonsense is both unfair and not fit for purpose, no toilets, showering, and a complete lack of parking, let alone a decent hot meal is  scandalous. 

Hopefully, there is a solution/s to this mess, but frankly it escapes me and any resident down here!

I'm glad I took the decision to stay local near to family, friends and The Valley.
I'll never be going near Dover, Folkestone or similar.
If I'm going abroad it'll be by plane.