Eurostar passengers departing from St Pancras International are being permitted to board their trains half an hour ahead of their journey, in a bid to reduce crowding at the London railway station. The change comes amid other measures intended to build capacity to cope with passenger numbers that are expected to triple by 2040.
Demand is there. Two of Eurostar’s busiest weeks ever happened this year, when 136,000 voyagers were handled in seven days. January to June 2025, passenger numbers have increased 4.23% compared to last year and average occupancy rates have been over 81%, the operator has revealed. In real terms, that’s over 100,000 extra travellers since the start of the year.
But the infrastructure to hold such customer volume is limited at St Pancras – a beloved war-damaged Victorian building that was given an £800-million (€927-million) refurbishment to open as an international terminus in 2007.
Letting passengers onto trains and relieving pressure on overwhelmed waiting areas is just stage one of a three-part plan to more than double the station’s throughput, from from 1,800 people an hour last year to up to 5,000 an hour.
Simon Lejeune, chief safety and station officer at Eurostar, said passengers appreciate the prompter boarding, explaining: “We are reducing check-in times. As a result, passengers can arrive a little bit later. We have started boarding our trains a little earlier as well. That gives a good sense of flow to the customer. It’s becoming a seamless, smooth experience.
Other issues addressed in the three-pronged approach include increasing the size of the effective “border area” within a confined footprint. It has nonetheless been doubled. Part of the solution was the choice of location for the technology and scanning equipment to meet the needs of the European Union’s new EES (Entry/Exit System) – kiosks for which will be spread around the station to ease potential logjams at key spots.
Experts considering the flow of passengers and pinch points at the station have mooted moving the arrivals area to upstairs to avoid arriving international passengers being funnelled downstairs as soon as their train pulls in. Instead they would be able to exit the station from the level of the platform they step off at.
Architecture firm Hawkins\Brown has been engaged to carry out an initial design and feasibility study aimed at enabling the station “to accommodate more passengers and operate more efficiently”. The first stage of their work is due for completion later in 2025.
