Britain’s rail regulator has given Virgin Trains approval to access HS1, the high-speed railway between St Pancras and the Channel Tunnel. This is another step towards Virgin running trains to Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam from 2030.

Virgin proposes to start services to Paris initially, with Brussels and Amsterdam to follow, eventually reaching around 20 daily return services.

The company now enters a very different market. Rail is already the established choice over flying between London and Paris. The key questions are whether Virgin can operate more efficiently than Eurostar and persuade passengers that two trains making the same journey are not really the same product.

When Eurostar launched in 1994, four million passengers a year flew between London and Paris. In 2025, almost ten million people travelled between the two cities by air or rail: 7.6 million by Eurostar and 2.3 million by air. Eurostar didn’t simply take passengers from airlines. It helped create a market two-and-a-half times larger whilst mostly eliminating meaningful city-to-city air competition.

Exploiting opportunity

That is exactly the sort of opportunity Virgin has historically been good at exploiting. Its transport businesses has rarely relied on being the cheapest. Instead, it has made otherwise similar journeys feel like different products. Virgin Trains demonstrated this on the West Coast Main Line. Avanti now operates the same railway, but without the same distinctive customer........

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