It is a bit outside TopSpeed’s mainstream, but the name is Top Speed and this is about the top speed.
   
202 mph in France and 195 mph in Britain.  Those were the speeds hit by the Eurostar as it traveled from Paris to London.
   
The Eurostar has just set a new speed record for Paris to London: an elapsed time of two hours, three minutes, and 39 seconds.
   
The Eurostar is Britain’s newest train.  This run was a special event, but the train will be going into commercial operation soon and is expected to take paying passengers between the two cities at just about the same speed.  Scheduled service will have an anticipated trip duration of two hours and twenty minutes and speeds as high as 186 mph.  It begins commercial operation November 19th.  Tickets will cost about $120.00 one-way.  The chief executive of Eurostar, Richard Brown, predicts that traffic will reach ten million passengers annually by 2010.
   
In order to reach these speeds, the Eurostar combines technology advancements in locomotives and trains with advances in track.  All of this, however, is very expensive.  To upgrade the British rails to standards already achieved in France cost approximately $12 billion.