Queen opens revamped London rail link to continent

LONDON - Britain's Queen Elizabeth formally opened London's St Pancras station on Tuesday after it had an 800 million pound ($1.6 billion) facelift to give passengers an elegant send off on a new high-speed rail link to the continent.

|PIC1|The station, a red-brick Gothic marvel completed during the reign of Queen Victoria in 1876, becomes the new home for Eurostar trains linking London with Paris and Brussels from Nov. 14, replacing Waterloo.

The renovation of St Pancras and the laying of a new high-speed line from the capital to the coast are all part of 10-year, 10 billion pound infrastructure upgrade that will deliver passengers to Paris in just two hours 15 minutes.

Accompanied by music from the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and opera singer Katherine Jenkins, the Queen unveiled a plaque to mark the restoration of the station with its 75-metre steel-and-glass train "shed", a structure built in 1868.

"It says a good deal about how we can take a 21st century approach whilst at the same time having due consideration of our heritage," the Queen said.

While Waterloo has successfully served as a terminus for Eurostar trains since 1994, the architects of St Pancras hope their elegantly restored station will offer a more stylish, romantic point of departure and arrival.

As well as featuring Europe's longest champagne bar at 93 metres (300 feet), with 40 marques of bubbly on offer, the station will also house a French brasserie and top-end clothing and organic food stores. Fast food joints have been banished.

In an effort to evoke the classic epoch of rail travel, the station also boasts a specially commissioned 9-metre sculpture, called "The Meeting", depicting a cosmopolitan couple locked in a romantic embrace, their foreheads touching.

There have been some rumblings of criticism that the station is pitching too high-end and will not manage to become a place to visit in and of itself, but the architects say they are sure customers are ready for a more refined travel experience.

"If you're travelling to Paris by train, it should evoke images of elegance and romance, and I think we're going to have achieved that," Alastair Lansley, the architect behind the renovation, told Reuters last month.