“Riding the Rails” Taken to a Whole New Level

Several years ago, my wife and I rode the Eurostar from London to Paris. It was slow going on the stretch from London to Dover – since improved, I understand – but the train really started to fly once we came up out of the tunnel in France. The ride was remarkably smooth, with attendants moving easily up and down the aisle, serving food from carts and pouring hot coffee and tea.

The engineer was climbing down out of the locomotive cab when we were walking down the platform in Paris and I asked him how fast we were traveling. “Trois cent kilometers,” he said … 300 kilometers, which computes to 187 miles an hour.

I thought about that yesterday when one of my Google Alerts picked up an item about a guy who tried to enter England illegally by climbing up onto the outside of a Eurostar train. He apparently got into a space between cars somewhere in France and rode the damn thing through the tunnel to the Ebbsfleet International train station in Kent, where he was spotted and busted.

No word yet on who he was or what prompted his unofficial trip to England. But it sure as hell must have been important!