Trenitalia France orders 19 Hitachi high-speed trains for a 2029 Channel Tunnel launch
Trenitalia France has ordered 19 Hitachi ETR 1000 Frecciarossa trains for a 2029 Paris–London Channel Tunnel launch, with a new depot at Maisons-Alfort Pompadour.
On August 7, 2026, Trenitalia France signed an agreement with Hitachi Rail for 19 high-speed trains — ETR 1000 Frecciarossa units — as the centrepiece of a push to launch a Paris–London service through the Channel Tunnel in 2029. The order, valued at approximately €2bn and framed by Railway-News as covering the trains together with long-term maintenance and technical support, gives the FS Italiane Group’s French subsidiary a fleet purpose-built for a route it has not previously run, while also reinforcing the Paris–Lyon, Paris–Milano and Paris–Marseille services that Frecciarossa has been operating for years.
The investment framing is one place where the two early reports diverge slightly. Railway Gazette International described the €2bn as a broader investment package that also encompasses the new maintenance facility being built at Maisons-Alfort Pompadour near Paris, on top of long-term maintenance and technical support for the trains. Railway-News’s figure, by contrast, covers the construction of the trains plus that maintenance and technical support, without explicitly placing the maintenance hub in the same envelope. Read together, the practical picture is consistent: a fleet, a service contract, and a depot to keep the fleet running — with disagreement only over what the headline number rolls up.
Channel Tunnel operation is a demanding technical environment, and the ETR 1000 platform has been adapted for it. Each trainset is expected to reduce CO2 equivalent emissions by roughly 120,000 tonnes versus the previous generation, according to Railway-News, and the new units will offer onboard Wi-Fi at up to 10 Gbps with a recyclability rate of up to 97.1% — the kind of figure that reads as much like a manufacturer brochure as a technical spec, but which Trenitalia has been foregrounding as the trains are marketed into an increasingly climate-conscious procurement landscape. The order also brings with it an employment footprint that Railway-News puts at around 2,000 jobs across France, Italy and the UK, a number that matters in a Channel Tunnel rail market whose competitive structure has been, for decades, essentially Eurostar.
A 2029 start is not a casual target. Channel Tunnel access requires certification of new rolling stock against some of the strictest interoperability and safety regimes in European rail, and the Maisons-Alfort Pompadour depot — called out by Railway Gazette as part of the broader investment package — has to be operational before revenue service can begin in earnest. The fleet will also be available for Paris–Lyon, Paris–Milano and Paris–Marseille duties while the Channel Tunnel certification work runs in parallel, so the trains do not sit idle waiting for their flagship route to open.
What the order actually does, in competitive terms, is convert Trenitalia France from a continental open-access operator into a credible Channel Tunnel entrant. Eurostar has held the London–Paris high-speed market almost alone since the tunnel opened in 1994, with Getlink (formerly Eurotunnel) as the infrastructure operator below it. A second open-access operator with an FS-backed balance sheet, a Hitachi-built fleet, and a depot already under construction does not by itself guarantee that the London–Paris market reshapes — pricing, border operations, and station capacity at London St Pancras will all set the ceiling — but it does guarantee that the assumption Eurostar faces no fleet-equipped rival for the foreseeable future is no longer a safe one.