THOUSANDS of people travelling by train to the Continent will have to pass through a “ghost station” because the Government has delayed funding its completion.

A vast hole below St Pancras station, London, has been built to accommodate a new Thameslink station, but ministers have failed to provide the £70 million needed to fit it with platforms and escalators.

As a result, passengers wanting to transfer from Thameslink to Eurostar services will have to drag their suitcases a third of a mile along congested streets. The existing, overcrowded Thameslink station is a ten-minute walk from St Pancras across two busy road junctions.

St Pancras and King’s Cross are together due to become Britain’s biggest rail hub when the second section of the Channel Tunnel Rail Link (CTRL) opens in summer 2007. Up to 100,000 passengers an hour will pass through the hub. Waterloo International will close and Eurostar trains from Paris and Brussels will terminate at St Pancras.

The Central London section of the Thameslink line has been closed for nine months while the 400-yard box has been built beneath St Pancras. Union Railways, the company building it, offered to start fitting it out while the line was closed. But the Government would not make a committment to funding the project and the box will lie empty indefinitely.

Thameslink trains will start running through the box from May 16 but will not be able to stop there because there are no station facilities. Union Railways said it would take at least two years to build the station and that, with funding still uncertain, it was unlikely to be ready until 2008 at the earliest.

Paul Charles, Eurostar communications director, said: “It is extremely frustrating that the new Thameslink station will not be ready for when Eurostar starts running to St Pancras. This was meant to be the showpiece hub for the 21st century but without Thameslink it will lose some of its shine.”

Brian Cooke, chairman of the London Transport Users Committee, wrote yesterday to Mike Mitchell, the Government’s director-general of railways, demanding an immediate decision on funding the station. “This is the last piece in the jigsaw of this huge interchange and it’s a great shame that the Government has not yet given the go-ahead,” he said. “The £60 million to £70 million it would cost is petty cash compared with the £5 billion being spent on CTRL. Passengers travelling on Thameslink from Gatwick and Luton to St Pancras will be hugely inconvenienced.”

The delay means that Thameslink passengers, who have already endured 35 weeks of disruption, face more line closures when the box is eventually fitted out. The delay is expected to add at least £10 million to the total cost of the project. Transport for London is drawing up an emergency plan to rescue the scheme and is considering whether it can find the £70 million from its own budget. But it remains unclear whether TfL could find a contractor able to complete the work by the summer of 2007.

The Department for Transport said: “We need to look further at options for the Thameslink box, including timing.”

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