Facilities at St Pancras too ‘inadequate’ to process new checks without ‘hour-long queues’ at peak times, says operator HS1
  • @cestvrai@lemm.eeEnglish
    13•10 months ago

    St Pancreas crowding has already been shitty, can’t believe they want to make it worse on purpose. These blokes are really brilliant…

    • BobEnglish
      8•10 months ago

      I’m sure a pancreas is useful but I’d never have thought it’d be canonised.

      • @taladar@feddit.deEnglish
        16•10 months ago

        The parish was named after Saint Pancras, a 14-year-old boy who had converted to Christianity and would not renounce his faith. As a result, he was beheaded by Diocletian in Rome in 304AD. He is the patron saint of children. St Pancras is a Greek name meaning ‘the one that holds everything’.

        Apparently St Pancras is the patron saint of indoctrinating children to become martyrs of their religion.

    • @trollercoaster@feddit.deEnglish
      7•10 months ago

      They have little choice, as having rigorous border controls at your side of your border with the EU is pretty much part of being a 3rd country. If the UK wanted this to go away, they could simply become a signatory to the Schengen Agreement. I guess this one simple step is somewhat unpalatable to the Brexiters currently ruling the UK, because free movement goes both ways.

  • AutoTL;DRBEnglish
    7•10 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    Eurostar could be forced to limit passenger numbers travelling from St Pancras each day under post-Brexit plans to bring in biometric border controls later this year, the owner of the station has warned.

    This will replace the stamping of passports for UK travellers, and instead require passengers to enter personal information and details about their trip, as well as submitting fingerprint and facial biometric data.

    In its own evidence to the committee, Eurostar said kiosks would create new queues and a more complex flow management that would represent a “higher risk for the delivery of the timetable and the growth of rail transport from St Pancras”.

    Last week, Ashford borough council, responsible for the area around the Port of Dover, told the committee 14-hour queues were “a reasonable worst-case” scenario if the scheme was implemented as planned.

    In its evidence to the committee, Eurostar called for an “emergency brake mechanism” to be established, which could be triggered by politicians if the EES led to permanently longer queues and traffic.

    In some cases up to one-third of the 900 seats were left unsold on services between London, Paris and Brussels, because the company could not deal with post-Brexit rules that required each UK passport to be stamped.

    The original article contains 704 words, the summary contains 206 words. Saved 71%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

  • @V0uges@jlai.luEnglish
    4•10 months ago

    Had to travel to London for work last week. Checks were a mess at Paris’s gare du Nord. Waited for over an hour in the freezing cold, Eurostar employees at the station were at their wit’s end and the train before mine left the station just short of 10 minutes before us because of delays with passports checks. But the return from St Pancras went quite smoothly, despite the British train strike on top of everything.

    Is it nice? No but unfortunately, it’s an expected consequence of brexit. We either need more border patrol or have people register their passport before the journey, like they ask us to do when exiting the UK. But that biometric shit, it’s plain stupid and another unnecessary complication.