If you’ve been umming and ahhing over a trip to Amsterdam, now might be the time to bite the bullet. That’s because in 2024 the oh-so-convenient Eurostar service from London to the Dutch capital will be stopping for up to 11 months.
The closure is down to huge renovation work being carried out at Amsterdam Centraal from June 2024 to May 2025. The revamp will see the demolition of the facilities currently used for passport and security checks, meaning that the station will not be able to process British passengers.
Rotterdam Centraal is not a viable alternative due to ‘capacity and safety reasons’. It means that the number of stations served by the Eurostar will be just four, compared with 12 pre-Brexit. Next year, routes from London will only reach Lille, Paris and Brussels.
The obvious alternative is to fly but if you’ve sworn against it for environmental reasons or it just makes you feel queasy, you actually can still travel by train via the Eurostar to Paris or Brussels, then on another international service like those run by Thalys. It may just take a little longer.
The company has also just axed its direct route to Disneyland Paris as extra passport checks drastically reduced capacity post-Brexit. The final train on this route departed on the morning of Monday, June 5.
A Eurostar spokesperson said: ‘Whilst we continue to recover financially from the pandemic and monitor developments in the proposed EU Entry Exit (EES) system, we need to focus on our core routes to ensure we can continue to provide the high level of service and experience that our customers rightly expect.’
There is a chance that the London-Amsterdam closure could last just seven months instead of eleven as the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure said the new Amstelpassage – which would see the Eurostar terminal relocated below the station – could open earlier than originally planned.
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