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| Queen opens new £800m St Pancras | Queen opens new £800m St Pancras |
| (10 minutes later) | |
| The official opening of London's St Pancras Station is under way after the station's £800m transformation. | |
| The Queen is leading the ceremony with another 1,500 VIPs as guests. | |
| Developer London & Continental Railways said St Pancras was the jewel in the crown of a £5.8bn project to bring high speed rail to the UK. | |
| St Pancras will eventually house Eurostar, high-speed domestic services to Kent, Midland Mainline, Thameslink and six Tube lines. | |
| Video history | |
| The evening ceremony will involve three trains arriving at St Pancras and their drivers meeting the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh. | |
| Her Majesty will also be introduced to those who have transformed the late-Victorian building into a 21st Century terminal. | |
| A suspended giant screen will show a video about the history of the station and the high speed rail project featuring F1 driver David Coulthard. | A suspended giant screen will show a video about the history of the station and the high speed rail project featuring F1 driver David Coulthard. |
| The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and pop singer Lemar will be providing some of the musical entertainment. | The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and pop singer Lemar will be providing some of the musical entertainment. |
| Work on the station began in 2001 to enable it to accommodate domestic rail services and Eurostar trains to and from France and Belgium. | |
| Dirt removed | |
| As part of its refurbishment, the station has been fitted with state-of-the-art technology including Wifi, touch-screen monitors and passenger information screens in all 60 retail units. | |
| The 68-mile railway line, known as High Speed 1 (HS1), runs from St Pancras to the Channel Tunnel opening at Folkestone, in Kent. | |
| More than 150 years of dirt has been removed from the brick work and a new roof has been fitted with 18,000 panes of self-cleaning glass. | |
| The front of the station, Sir George Gilbert Scott's neo-Gothic building, will open as a five-star hotel in 2009. | |
| Eurostar is switching its terminal from Waterloo station to St Pancras and will be offering quicker journey times on services from London to Paris and Brussels. |