Eurostar wants to acquire “up to 50 new trains” by 2030 after achieving a “historic” turnover of 2 billion euros in 2023, the railway company announced on Thursday. No orders have yet been placed and Eurostar, which operates rail links between five countries – France, Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany – is considering the acquisitions to absorb “growing demand for travel” and “accommodate 30 million annual passengers by 2030” which it has set as its objective, the company said in a press release.
The new trainsets would partly replace those having to be scrapped, given their age. In total, these potential acquisitions would bring the Eurostar fleet to 67 trains, compared to 51 currently. “The aim is to put the first new trains into service in the early 2030s,” Eurostar says.
The company, majority owned by SNCF Voyageurs, with participations from the Belgian company SNCB, the Caisse des Dépôts et Placement du Québec (CDPQ) and the investment fund Federated Hermes Infrastructure, recorded a record turnover of 2 billion euros in 2023. It has not disclosed its net income. Eurostar carried 18.6 million passengers in 2023, an increase of 22% compared to the previous year. The relationships that have seen the strongest growth are those between Amsterdam and London (38%), Brussels and London (33%) and Paris and London (25%). The SNCF Voyageurs subsidiary also announced that it had reduced its net debt by a third, which now stands at 650 million euros, thanks to “strong cash generation following its post-Covid recovery” and “ a new green term loan of 650 million euros over five years.
Eurostar has been running TGVs since 1994 between London and the European continent through the Channel Tunnel. Last fall, it absorbed the Thalys brand, which had operated connections between Paris, the Benelux and north-west Germany since 1995. The railway company’s last order dates back to 2014, when Eurostar acquired seven trainsets from Siemens.
