Goodbye, Waterloo [S. Worthen

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Today was the last day of Eurostar services from Waterloo. As of tomorrow, they'll be running from St. Pancras only. Passing through Waterloo en route to the Eye,

siusaidh and I stopped to watch the festivities. The samples of the day's entertainments we saw included singers, breakdancers, an interview with the company's CEO, an interview with someone to ride on the first Eurostar train from Waterloo, and a video of the ceremony opening St. Pancras a few days ago.

Post-Eye, the audience was had filled out a bit more. Newsreporters stood at the end of the platform to film the last appearance of high-speed trains in the station for the foreseeable future.

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There are 13 comments on this entry. (Reply.)

It's probably a good idea to make a big deal out of the change...I just bet people are still going to turn up at Waterloo expecting to catch their train.

For some reason this happens in the San Francisco Bay area with people going to the wrong airport all the time - Oakland versus San Francisco. When it's happened it's usually been someone daydreaming on public transport and catching the wrong train. I haven't just seen it once but a number of times and that too to people who have lived there for years!

I wonder if familiarity means you're more likely to not check your itinerary? or is it e-tickets?

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Yes it is! Every underground station I passed through yesterday was making announcements about it. There's a massive postering campaign all across the city. There's lots of press coverage.

But people will still get confused - perhaps even more so in a few months when the information campaign has died down.

(Airports: London has 5 of them. Once, I had no idea what time a houseguest would be arriving. She'd told me her time of flight arrival, but not airline, flight number, or airport.)

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St. Pancreas?

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Are you punning or enquiring?

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I hope its the first, cause otherwise I'm just a terrible speller.

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Then I shall not tell you that St. Pancras is a mainline rail station on the north side of central London, right next door to King's Cross, which has been under massive construction to build the new Eurostar terminal there allowing faster tracks across the UK, because you are not enquiring.

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