Here is the fact to hold onto before anyone sells you a cheap seat to Paris: the Channel Tunnel has been using only about half the train slots available on its track, according to Euronews. One operator, Eurostar, has been the tunnel's only passenger railway since 1994, and a single operator books only so many of the available paths. Nobody else has taken the rest, which has little to do with the crossing and everything to do with what sits on either side of it.
This week the newest challenger, a British startup called Gemini Trains, said it wants to run London to Cologne in about four hours, as early as 2030, cutting a journey that today takes roughly six hours with a change. Euronews reports it teased introductory one-way fares to Paris from around 59 pounds, plus routes to Brussels and, later, Frankfurt and Dusseldorf. Gemini's chief executive, Adrian Quine, told Euronews the company is "a disruptor operator which constantly challenges the status quo," promising "new routes, new stations, new trains, new interiors, new cheaper fares." The date is soft, Gemini has said 2029 elsewhere, and I read that sentence as a wish list, not a timetable.
I want the competition to be real, and more operators should mean more seats and lower fares. But I flag every route by how far it is from carrying a passenger, and Gemini is the most conditional of the lot.
Here is why. To run a cross-Channel train you need somewhere to maintain it, and only one British site can house these oversized trains: Temple Mills International depot in east London, owned by Eurostar. Four newcomers applied for space there. On 30 October 2025 the regulator, the Office of Rail and Road, allocated the depot's available capacity to just one of them, Richard Branson's Virgin Trains, and turned down the other three: Italy's state-owned Trenitalia, the Spanish startup Evolyn, and Gemini. In its decision, the ORR judged Virgin's plans "more financially and operationally robust," with "clear evidence of investor backing." The ruling covers depot access, not the license to run services, which is still to come.
That single ruling is the whole story. Eurostar owns the depot, and during the process it argued the applications were invalid and that there was no room for a second operator; the ORR's Ian Biggar told the company Temple Mills is not exempt from the depot-access rules. Under UK and EU-derived law a facility everyone needs counts as essential and must be offered on fair terms. A commissioned study, confirmed on 5 June 2025, found room "for one additional operator or for Eurostar to grow." One. So the half-empty track squares with the thesis: the paths exist, but the depot that feeds them had room for one tenant, and Virgin took it. Martin Jones, the ORR's deputy director for access and international, called the decision "backing customer choice and competition in international rail," unlocking up to 700 million pounds of investment. Eurostar said it acknowledged the ruling and was reviewing its next steps, its priority the fleet and depot upgrades it has announced.
So Virgin, not Gemini, is the operator with a depot slot, targeting a 2030 launch from St Pancras to Paris, Brussels, and Amsterdam on 12 new trains from the French trainmaker Alstom. Gemini says it is talking to the Department for Transport about a brand-new depot at Ashford, or sites in Belgium or Germany, which does not yet exist. Its 59-pound Paris fare is a marketing number attached to a train with nowhere to sleep at night.
Eurostar is not standing still either. It has ordered up to 50 new Alstom double-decker trains, a bet of about 2 billion euros (1.7 billion pounds) per Rail Magazine, the first due in service around May 2031, adding roughly 20 percent more capacity and opening its own direct routes to Frankfurt via Cologne and to Geneva. The incumbent that opposed a second operator is now spending to stay ahead.
What does this mean for you? Nothing you can book today, and probably nothing before the end of the decade. When it arrives, watch which trains actually run, not which fares get announced: Virgin has the depot access, Eurostar has the fleet order, Gemini has a press release and a number. The next date that matters is not a fare but whether Virgin and Eurostar, now landlord and rival, sign the Temple Mills terms the ruling requires. Until a train has a bed for the night, it is a route on a slide, not a journey you can take.
