If there's one domain in which Europe doesn't take lessons from the United States, it's rail. In February, US President Donald Trump described the construction of the high-speed rail link between Los Angeles and San Francisco as the "worst managed project" he had ever seen. On that point, he's probably right. He might have made the same remark about the epic construction of the Channel Tunnel – except that this piece of infrastructure turned 30 in May of 2024. The challenge now is to put it to more use.

Why not set up a competitor to Eurostar, the only company operating the lines linking London, Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam? Virgin Group, the company set up by the jack-of-all-trades British billionaire Richard Branson, whose subsidiary Virgin Trains operated rail services in the west of England between 1997 and 2019, is one candidate for the challenge. On Saturday, March 8, it announced that it wanted to raise £700 million (€834 million), in capital and debt, to get started on this. Yet, so far, nothing is set in stone.

More than 10 years ago, Deutsche Bahn gave up on a similar group. Since then, the operator of the Channel Tunnel, Getlink (formerly known as Eurotunnel), has been struggling to break down the many technical barriers to such a project, one by one. Meanwhile, a train depot in north-east London has become Eurostar's best argument for protecting its de facto monopoly.

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