All parts of ticket sales, check in, waiting, shops, currency exchange, etc. are much more like an airport than like a conventional railroad station. It is much quieter, cleaner, more elegant (carpeting, chrome and glass, leather upholstered seating in the waiting areas, etc.) and more secure with airport style baggage X-ray and metal detector doorways, etc. Unlike airlines, they don't check any luggage, so we wheeled the cart up the moving sidewalk to the platform and threw the luggage into our assigned car where there is a large luggage rack/compartment right next to the doorway. Each car has a large LCD display next to each door where the car number and destination are shown.

We pulled out of Waterloo station very slowly and never went more than about 15 to 20 MPH for the first several miles. Even at this very low speed, there was a point just south of the station where the train bottomed out on its pneumatic springs. The tracks within London are so bad that it took almost 5 minutes for the train to stop oscillating from the bottoming out incident. After leaving London the train speeded up to around 60 MPH. We maintained this speed all the way through the tunnel until we were on French soil. The tracks on the British side were not upgraded to handle high speed service and this is apparently not planned until sometime well after the year 2000.

In another airline-like feature, they had attendants come through two or three times with snack trolleys loaded with the usual junk food and drink. The goods were arranged in easy to see racks with prices posted in both pounds and franks and the attendants had little hand-held "cash registers" which also functioned in both languages/currency. Indeed all the employees are required to speak fluently at least English and French and many also speak Flemish and German.

Just before we entered the tunnel at Fokestone, an on-board passport/customs official came through to glance at everyone's passport. As she came to me, I handed my passport to her and she just looked at the picture and the expiration date and handed it back. Lacy insisted that they stamp hers and they had to fish out a stamp for her!

As near as I could tell (given the speed!), the overhead wire mechanism looked like the same scheme we use for the Light Rail here in Portland. There is the actual power conductor wire suspended evenly from a catenary wire which dips from pole to pole where it is supported from an insulated, cantilevered arm. Every 20 poles the conductor wire is taken up (to a tension mechanism) while a new conductor wire is let down to replace it. I bought a little booklet about the Eurostar and Chunnel at the London Transport museum and it has some fascinating information. The train is designed to run on the three different types of power which are used by Britain (750 VDC, third rail), Belgium (3,000 VAC, overhead, but different than France!) and France (25,000 VAC, overhead, TGV standard).