Still Working Out Kinks in Chunnel Service : Transit: Eurostar Link, which connects to northern Britain, is slower than regular trains and has trouble attracting customers.

Chugging south along the misty Scottish coastline, this train wows you mainly by its abundance of elbow room.

The 30 or so people aboard are spread out among 398 seats. Some of the big cars are completely empty on the new Eurostar Link service that connects to Paris or Brussels through the Channel Tunnel.

This is far from normal for a long-distance train in Britain, where it’s always advisable to reserve a seat.

“We were surprised because the travel agent didn’t give us a [reserved] seat,” said Jessie Boys, a retired school supervisor from Washington, England. “She said you don’t need to book--it’ll be empty. And it was. They must be running at a loss.”

Indeed. Empty trains make no money. But for Eurostar, operator of the passenger trains that run between England and France through the Channel Tunnel, it’s the price of doing business.

When Parliament passed the Channel Tunnel Act nearly a decade ago, lawmakers required that the new trains would serve northern parts of Britain, so residents of London and the prosperous Southeast would not be the only ones to benefit.

Eurostar rents and runs British Rail Intercity trains to run from Edinburgh to London, where passengers get on the real high-speed Eurostar trains that use the “Chunnel.”

Tickets are sold only to passengers planning to make a complete international journey, so the Eurostar Link is unable to fill any of its many empty seats with people seeking to travel just one or two stations down the line.

Richard Edgley, managing director of European Passenger Services, the British arm of Eurostar, acknowledged this is a less than desirable way to run a railroad.

Until operators can begin using real Eurostar trains--which they hope will boost business--they are sticking with the Eurostar Link to fulfill this obligation. There isn’t enough Eurostar rolling stock to serve the northern country yet.

“These are a bit of an uneasy compromise,” Edgley said in an interview. “First of all, they’re slower” and passengers must disembark in London to connect with Paris-bound trains.

Indeed, anybody spending a bit of time with a train schedule could make a wider range of connections by taking regular services from Scotland to London. From Manchester to London, another route being awkwardly pioneered by the Eurostar Link, passengers charting their own journey on regular trains could make better connections and even save time.

Edgley wouldn’t detail the economics. “Certainly at this stage it’s well below break-even.”

Eurostar Link probably shouldn’t count on too many high-paying business travelers, who will likely choose a one hour and 40 minute flight to Paris over the nine-hour train ride.

There may be a market for leisure travelers. Unfortunately for the bottom line, these folks won’t ride unless the price is right.

Neil Leishman and his wife, Elizabeth, had embarked on a 30-hour train journey from their home in Johnstone, Scotland, to Barcelona, Spain.

Price was the motive. Their total travel cost was 154 pounds, or $240, thanks to discounts Leishman gets through his job with ScotRail, the Scottish operations of British Rail.

“To put it bluntly, the money was scarce,” Elizabeth Leishman said.

Edinburgh art student Karen Robertson travels to Paris three times a year so her 4-year-old son, Louis, can spend time with his French grandparents.

Robertson would rather fly, but the train is cheaper. She called the direct service a vast improvement over the days when she took a train, then a ferry, then another train, for a total of 16 hours to Paris.

But she puzzled over the nearly empty Eurostar Link.

“It seems much more sensible to use the normal trains,” Robertson said. “It’s more flexible.”

The small group of travelers who embarked on a Friday, generally the train’s busiest day, were not going to get the real Eurostar experience for hours.

The train announcements rang out in Scottish twang, with none of the French you hear on the state-of-the-art Eurostar trains that can smoothly whiz along at 187 m.p.h.

“It’s not bad,” opined Lorraine Foster, a Newcastle homemaker off for a weekend break. “I’ll read my papers on this train and get drunk on the next train.”

There was plenty of time for reading and drinking.

Edinburgh chauffeur and tour guide David Findlay skipped lunch after a bad experience with a breakfast bacon roll.

“I’ve taken the little sticker off the packet it was in and I know who to write to to complain,” Findlay said.

Arriving in north London, Eurostar Link takes a circuitous route through tiny neighborhood train stations to reach Waterloo Station, the London base of the Eurostars that is south of the Thames River. The train crawls along at a snail’s pace--a pitfall that will be avoided when real Eurostar trains from Scotland go into service and bypass London.

Conductor Dave Barrett walked through the cars giving people a personal explanation of the bizarre routing.

“It’s not the fastest, and not the prettiest part of London,” Barrett said. “But we should get to Waterloo right on time.”

That Friday, Eurostar Link was seven minutes early. Not bad, considering the actual Eurostars arrive late about one-third of the time, albeit generally by just a few minutes.