HERE’S a tip for anyone travelling on Eurostar this week: stand with your back to the escalators on Waterloo station concourse and have a look up at the office windows opposite. Two floors up (right of the main arch, left of the AMT coffee booth) you may see a short, middle-aged man grinning out at you. Give him a wave. He’ll probably wave back.

For right now Richard Brown, chief executive of Eurostar and affable occupant of the office that offers such a good view of the trains, has plenty to be pleased about.

Tomorrow he is expected to announce the first increase in passenger numbers for Eurostar after two years of slump. In particular, figures covering the last quarter of 2003 — since part of the new, high-speed Channel tunnel rail link opened in Britain — are expected to “knock people’s socks off”.

Customers, offered lower prices and 20 minutes off the previous journey times to Paris and Brussels, have been piling back onto Eurostar.

There is more. Within the next few months Brown, 50, who was shipped in to shake up the service 16 months ago, will have completed his reorganisation of the company. Once a complex, push-me/pull-you affair fronted by three different national rail operations, Eurostar will emerge as one entity with centralised management and decision making.

Over the next three years Brown will also see new agreements put in place reducing the amount of money Eurostar has to pay to use the Channel tunnel, and the completion of the final bit of high-speed rail link to a spanking new terminus at London’s St Pancras station. So far, so promising.

But will the Eurostar service, 10 years old in November, ever make a profit? “Ah,” says Brown, looking pensive at the head of the meeting table in his Waterloo office. “Ah” says just about everyone else you ask in the rail industry, too. It already would make a profit, Brown adds finally, if it wasn’t for the exorbitant track and tunnel- access fees it has to pay (though estimates of £100m losses in 2002 are dismissed as “rubbish” by Eurostar executives).

It will, however, take decades to pay back the cost of setting up the whole thing. Part-owned by French and Belgian state railways, as well as a consortium of quoted British companies, and with its track costs underpinned by government finance, the operation will remain very much a public-sector venture.

All passengers ask is that it works. For that, they will have to thank Brown. A 25-year rail veteran who started at BR and ended up running Midland Mainline for National Express, he appears to have brought coherence, punctuality and efficiency to Eurostar at a time when passenger numbers and staff morale were both beginning to sink.

“We’ve started to take share up on both routes, from London to Paris and to Brussels,” says Brown. Passenger numbers, which dropped from 7.1m through the tunnel in 2000 to 6.6m in 2002, are now increasing. Eurostar’s share of the air-rail passenger market to Paris, 58% in 2002, is edging closer to Brown’s target of 80%. His strategy of reducing fares at the same time as offering faster journey times appears to be working. No wonder he’s chipper.

And few in the industry will resent his success. Short, balding, courteous, with a great slab of a face and a Desperate Dan chin, Brown is by reputation one of the best man-managers and strategists left in the rail business.

The son of a west London estate agent, he trained as an engineer at Cambridge and joined British Rail young, turning down offers from Shell and Mobil because he thought “the management challenges would be more interesting”.

He rose through BR, helping to run InterCity and setting up Midland Mainline, which he later ran for National Express after privatisation. He eventually became commercial director of the National Express group but left suddenly two years ago, some say after a boardroom bust-up. Brown, typically, says nothing.

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