{"id":398,"date":"2003-07-29T05:59:13","date_gmt":"2003-07-29T09:59:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/benadida\/2003\/07\/29\/theory-and-practice-the-eurostar\/"},"modified":"2003-07-29T05:59:13","modified_gmt":"2003-07-29T09:59:13","slug":"theory-and-practice-the-eurostar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/2003\/07\/29\/theory-and-practice-the-eurostar\/","title":{"rendered":"Theory and Practice: The Eurostar"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a name='a12'><\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are different.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>\nI took the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.eurostar.com\">Eurostar<\/a> from Paris to London this past weekend. The Eurostar is effectively a French TGV that crosses from the French rail system to the British one via a 120km tunnel. On the French side, the train is the fastest TGV yet, leaving speeding cars on the highway looking like snails. On the British side, we slowed down to a crawl. Then the rain caused a signalling problem which stopped the train for an hour.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nSo yeah, fast trains work if fast rails are in place.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nThankfully, the British side of the track is being entirely redone. In Fall 2003, new rails (the first new rails built in Britain in 100 years) will shave off another 20 minutes off the Paris\/London trip and greatly improve reliability. In 2007, the last part of the old British rail will be replaced, shaving yet another 20 minutes. By then, we can expect the Paris\/London trip to be just a tad over 2 hours. British rails will be <b> made to fit the standard<\/b>.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nNow if they could only do something about the train food&#8230;.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are different.&#8221; I took the Eurostar from Paris to London this past weekend. The Eurostar is effectively a French TGV that crosses from the French rail system to the British one via a 120km tunnel. On the French side, the train is the fastest [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":93,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[127],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-398","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/93"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=398"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=398"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}