It hasn't been an easy few months for Eurostar. Two bouts of exceptionally bad weather brought the network to a complete halt. The first left passengers stranded for up to 24 hours in France. ("They didn't even try to get us on to a flight to London," one frequent traveller complained to me.) Then came the cold snap at the beginning of February, when the sharp rise in air temperature as trains entered the tunnel defrosted the snow and ice clinging to the trains and caused electrical failure.
To make matters worse, passenger numbers fell 5% last year as travellers chose cheapness over convenience and headed for airports instead of Waterloo. Many found the fare structure complex and the price of a last-minute booking prohibitive.
In fact, says Mark Smith, Eurostar's punctuality is no worse than before. Smith - who works for the Strategic Rail Authority and in his spare time edits the extremely useful Seat61.com, a guide to rail travel abroad - says about 85% of trains arrive on time, which compares favourably with, say, Heathrow, where more than a quarter of flights are late.
Eurostar insists the condensation problem is a rarity. "It's happened literally a handful of times since Eurostar's been in service," said a spokesman. Efforts are being made to sweep the trains of snow before they enter the tunnel. The Gare du Nord terminal in Paris, infamous for its long check-in queues and lack of seats, is currently being rebuilt. And the journey time to Paris will be cut to 2 hours 35 minutes in the autumn when the first section of the Channel Tunnel rail link (www.ctrl.co.uk has the plans) opens.
By 2007, when the second section opens, another 20 minutes will be knocked off the Paris journey and Brussels will be only two hours away.
But even if the reliability is improving, what about the cost? It pays to be judicious about your travel times, according to Eurostar. While walk-up fares are cheaper and most of the advance purchase restrictions have been lifted (see the fares section of Eurostar.com for the new structure), catching one of the two early trains to Paris on weekdays (05.15 and 06.19) or leaving London between 09.23 and 13.53 tends to be cheaper. Peak trains start again at 14.43 on the return leg and run until 20.43.
Watch out, though, for the new Value Business fare, which doesn't let you into the new Philippe Starck lounges in Paris, Brussels and London. And peak travel is still not cheap. A Thursday return to Paris in April comes in at £299 on Eurostar and £76 on BA, with EasyJet's first flight from Luton even cheaper.
There's nothing to stop you booking tickets from, say, Paris to Geneva on the very good French railways site (www.voyages-sncf.com - click on the Union flag on the left), where a single costs 69 euros (£47).
Meanwhile, the new Rail Europe website (www.raileurope.co.uk) offering through-tickets from Britain to the continent is a big disappointment, not just because it's incomplete (tickets to the Netherlands still have to be booked over the phone), but because the fares are sky-high. No wonder the government knows it can levy a "green" tax on air passengers when a standard return ticket to Ghent costs £310.
