St Pancras railway station

The station's name comes from the St. Pancras parish, whose name originates from the fourth-century Christian boy martyr Pancras of Rome. The station was commissioned by the Midland Railway (MR), who had a network of routes in the Midlands and in south and west Yorkshire and Lancashire, but no route of its own to London. Before 1857 the MR used the lines of the L&NWR for trains into the capital; subsequently, the company's Leicester and Hitchin Railway gave access to London via the Great Northern Railway (GNR). In 1862, traffic for the second International Exhibition suffered extensive delays over the stretch of line into London over the GNR's track; the route into the city via the L&NWR…

The original plan for the Channel Tunnel Rail Link (CTRL) involved a tunnel from south-east of London to an underground terminus in the vicinity of King's Cross. However, a late change of plan, principally driven by the then Secretary of State for the Environment Michael Heseltine's desire for urban regeneration in east London, led to a change of route, with the new line approaching London from the east. This opened the possibility of reusing St Pancras as the terminus, with access via the North London Line, which crosses the throat of the station. The idea of using the North London line was rejected in 1994 by the transport secretary, John MacGregor, as "difficult to construct and…

at St Pancras Station]] In early November 2007, Eurostar conducted a testing programme in which some 6000 members of the public were involved in passenger check-in, immigration control and departure trials, during which the "passengers" each made three return journeys out of St Pancras to the entrance to the London tunnel. On 4 September 2007, the first test train ran from Paris Gare du Nord to St Pancras. Children's illustrator Quentin Blake was commissioned to provide a huge mural of an "imaginary welcoming committee" as a disguise for one of the remaining ramshackle Stanley Building South immediately opposite the station exit. St Pancras was officially re-opened as St Pancras…