▶The 2024 Summer Olympic Games in Paris finished yesterday and were a great success, with the Paralympics still to come.

▶To coincide with this, French Railways and Belgian Railways collaborated to launch a new cross-border rail service between Paris and Brussels.

▶ But even before the Games finished, this new service was halved to just four carriages (see the screenshot below) – why is that?

When the new service launched in July, one commentator called it a “godsend” because “Since Eurostar (ex-Thalys) is the sole operator on the Paris-Brussels route, with only limited capacity using single-level HSTs, they can charge you a S*** lot of money for such a short journey”.

While it uses rolling stock from Belgian Railways (SNCB/NMBS), it is a collaboration, with French Railways (SNCF) taking over the train within France.

However, on its in-house app and website, SNCF does not sell this new service. This means that the vast majority of rail passengers in France do not even know it exists.

Consequently, due to the lack of demand – just two weeks after starting with eight carriages – the service has already been halved to four carriages (see the screenshot below).

ALLRAIL’s Policy Officer Salim Benkirane says: “We want cross-border rail to grow. So why are some companies restricting where the train tickets are sold?

What we need is an Open Market – Full Transparency. All Rail Tickets should be shown and sold not at 5% or 50% but at 100% of Rail Ticket Vendors.”