The Eurostar station at Waterloo closed today, and tomorrow, the brand new Eurostar station will open up at St. Pancras in London.

Not everyone’s thrilled about the loss of the Eurostar at Waterloo, and it’s true that there were some benefits to having the Eurostar pull in there—not least in that Waterloo’s pretty much in the center of London, so it’s convenient for tourists and you get a nice view of the city when you arrive. As a Brightonian, though, I’m quite happy that the Eurostar will be leaving from St. Pancras now, because while Waterloo is physically closer to Brighton, you have to change from the train to the tube to get there, whereas King’s Cross/St. Pancras is a straight shot on the train.

But the real benefit of the high-speed line from St. Pancras, of course, is that the already incredibly short journey times to continental Europe have been reduced even more. It will now take just 2 hours and 15 minutes to get from London to Paris. Even taking my train journey from Brighton to London into account, it won’t take me much more than three and a half hours to get from my doorstep to the heart of Paris on the Eurostar. Three hours wouldn’t even get me out of Gatwick if I were to fly to Paris, and I’d have to face Charles de Gaulle (the airport, that is, not the general) on the other end.

It will actually take less than two hours to get from London to Brussels and less than an hour and a half to get to Lille. And now that there’s a TGV between Paris and Strasbourg, I could be dining on tarte flambée almost faster than you can say—well, tarte flambée. And the journey there would be part of the fun.

There’s definitely something much more exciting—and glamorous, even—about traveling by train than by plane (unless you always get to travel Virgin Upper Class, in which case, that’s pretty glamorous). Planes are just buses in the sky. After the hassle of security and the boredom of sitting around waiting to board, you’re herded onto the plane in one airport, you have to endure a dull, cramped flight, you disembark in another airport that probably looks exactly the same as the one you just left, and then you have to go through the whole passport check/baggage claim rigamarole, before you finally stumble onto the pavement and are forced to find transportation from the airport—which is more than likely out in the boondocks—to your ultimate destination. When you’re flying, the journey is most certainly not part of the fun. Unless, maybe, you’ve never flown before. Or you’re a masochist.

With a train, on the other hand—a nice train, anyway, like a Eurostar, an ICE, or a TGV, where you have a seat, and a dining car, and a fairly good guarantee that you’re going to arrive at your destination on time—you have the leisure to build up a good head of excitement as you journey through each of the waypoints along your route. You can look out the windows and see something other than clouds. You can get up and walk around comfortably. You can go to the dining car and pretend you’re in North by Northwest. And when you arrive at a central train station, it’s usually just that: central. So when you alight from your train, you’re right in heart of things, and your holiday has begun in style.

And although the Eurostar has already been running for 13 years now, I’m still amazed at the thought of boarding a train in London and disembarking in Paris. Going under the English Channel hasn’t lost its excitement, and the idea of taking a day trip to Paris hasn’t lost its thrill. Though the train is ostensibly a “retro” way to travel, the Eurostar service somehow seems to be from the future—a future in which international travel isn’t only affordable, it’s also ecologically sustainable, comfortable and fun.