Confirmation this week that Eurostar had no intention of stopping any of its trains in Kent during 2024 – and couldn’t commit to a return in 2025 either – will have come as a surprise to few.

The mood music – the train operator being hundreds of millions of pounds in debt and a constant bleating of limited demand for such a revival – suggested little else.

All of which means that should, by some miracle, it resume services in March 2025, the county will have been without a stopping service for five long years.

Five years in which Kent’s carefully orchestrated business case of being the ideal place for foreign firms to set up UK outposts or staff to easily come and go from the likes of Paris and Brussels has dwindled and, let’s face it, died.

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If business needs certainty – a refrain we so frequently hear – Eurostar turning its back on the county fails to offer it.

Even a return after five years would be greeted with concerns over its longevity. That dream of being a part of the European rail network may, sadly, be at an end.

So the stations at Ashford and Ebbsfleet – their ‘international’ monickers only now applicable as Eurostar passengers glimpse them for about a millisecond as they rush from one end of the county to the other – will continue to be a hit only with domestic travellers wanting a quicker route to London. That has proved the one saving grace of the whole infrastructure project. Business in the county has, undoubtedly, benefited from those fast links to the capital.

But it was never meant to be like this. The Kent business community was promised so much. So much was invested in the pursuit of the future financial rewards we were constantly told would be there if we went looking.

What the county cannot have imagined, however, back in the 1990s when services first started, was just how dramatically the environment would change.

The pandemic knocked Eurostar’s business model for six and saw it haemorrhage cash at a rate which put it on life-support amid fears of complete financial collapse.

That had come hot on the heels of the decision in 2016 to vote to ‘leave’ the EU. A decision which has failed, so far at least, to deliver the riches promised. It has, however, delivered ample paperwork, additional costs and, come October, the potential to snarl up the county’s roads in rather dramatic fashion as new digital border checks come into force.

Instead of daily international trains stopping in the county, we face the return of the M20-disrupting Operation Brock.

All of which is somewhat sobering for the Kent business community who would have felt that after the challenges it has faced in recent years, it was owed a bit of a break.

Kent was sold an international dream – not just as the well-established ‘Gateway to Europe’, which, of course, the ports and Eurotunnel still provide – but as a place where commuting across borders was a realistic option; where skills, talents, experiences and profits could be shared and, perhaps most crucially, international markets could be accessed.

Instead, through no fault of the county, we have been sold something of a pup.

So what now? Hopes continue to be pinned on an alternative to Eurostar – a different operator prepared to stop again in Kent and make it work.

The key question, however, will be if Eurostar feels there is not a significant financial benefit to stopping off at Ashford or Ebbsfleet and the business community can no longer bank on a reliable, long-term service, will international rail travel from Kent ever truly be viable?

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