PARIS: When Eurostar train No. 9024 arrived at the Gare du Nord in Paris on Wednesday afternoon, it had traveled the 490 kilometers from London in two hours and 20 minutes. That was only five minutes slower than the scheduled time for the new high-speed service connecting the Paris station and St. Pancras, the spectacularly restored station in London that has supplanted Waterloo as the Eurostar terminus in London.

The first commercial running of Eurostar trains to Brussels and Paris from St. Pancras was launched on a tide of Champagne before the first trains pulled out of the great "railway cathedral" that St. Pancras, the pride of 19th-century London, has become again with a three-year, £825 million, or $1.7-billion, restoration that cleared away 140 years of grime and decay.

But the exuberance of the inaugural runs to Paris on Wednesday was blunted, at least somewhat, by what greeted thousands of passengers on arrival in the French capital.

After traveling at an average speed of more than 200 kilometers, or 130 miles, an hour across southern England and northern France, and running at 295 kilometers an hour for much of the way, the passengers arrived at the Gare du Nord to find themselves reduced to a snail's pace by the transportation strikes that closed the Paris Métro and clogged the streets with traffic jams.

Those who could find taxis spent another hour reaching hotels in central Paris. Some gave up and walked, wheeling their bags behind them.

Still, while the trek through Paris made it a case of more haste, less speed, the new Eurostar service drew enthusiastic reviews from most of those who made the journey.

In traveling time, the two capitals have never been closer, now that Britain has completed the last 30-kilometer stretch of its 110-kilometer "High Speed 1" route from the exit of the Channel Tunnel at Folkestone to St. Pancras on the northern edge of central London.

The new high-speed route from the coast, completed at a cost to British taxpayers of £5.8-billion, eliminates the 145-kilometer-an-hour limit that Eurostar trains faced on the last stretch of their run to Waterloo. The first Eurostar trains began plying the route in 1994, and that speed remained in force on the last leg to Waterloo after the first section of the high-speed route was opened in 2003.

The completion of the route cuts journey times between London and Eurostar's two principal European destinations, Paris and Brussels, by 20 minutes, with the scheduled time for the nonstop runs between Paris and London set at two hours and 15 minutes, and the express runs to Brussels at one hour and 51 minutes.

The faster rail journeys will put new pressure on airlines that have already seen Eurostar trains take nearly three-quarters of the traffic on those routes.

Eurostar figures show that eight million people traveled on the trains last year, and the company hopes to raise that number to 10 million within three years on the back of the shift to St. Pancras.

But the mood among travelers Wednesday suggested that there was more to the new route than the speed of the journeys, and that St. Pancras has every prospect of fulfilling its ambition of becoming a "destination" in itself.

Forty years after the poet John Betjeman led a campaign to save St. Pancras from demolition, it has emerged from its years of restoration as one of the grandest public buildings in Britain. Architecture critics have been virtuallyunanimous in praising the result, and, judging by the reaction of travelers and others who crowded into the station for its commercial inauguration, the public loves it just as much.

For Austi Pierre-Stéphane, a 44-year-old Parisian who travels to London frequently as the head of a French travel agency, it is a new and more vibrant 21st-century Britain that finds expression at St. Pancras.

Eurostar trains arrive and depart under the vast canopy of blue-grey steel and glass that has emerged from the restoration of the great railway shed designed by William Henry Barlow and completed in 1867.

From the 1920s on, St. Pancras, terminus for many of the trains that served Britain's industrial midlands, had suffered from neglect, becoming, like many of London's other great rail stations, a grimy place.

By the 1960s, when it was saved from demolition, it was known as a haven for drug-dealers and streetwalkers. Most travelers hastened through, if they could not avoid it altogether.

Britain also is transforming St. Pancras into a hub for expensive retail stores and restaurants, most of which missed the opening deadline Wednesday but planned to be in business before Christmas.

A taste of what lies ahead came from what Eurostar spokesmen described as the longest Champagne bar in Europe, a 100-meter, or 330-foot stretch of counters and tables that was crammed from midmorning with travelers and sightseers sipping Dom Perignon and other vintages from a vantage point that placed them only steps away from one of the Paris-bound trains, separated by a clear glass wall.

"To me, St. Pancras is typical of the change in Britain," Pierre-Stéphane said. "The country has undergone a renaissance. When I visited London for the first time 25 years ago, the place was dirty and sad and gray. Now it's a different atmosphere altogether. It's a happy, vibrant place and you feel it everywhere."

As for St. Pancras, he said, its restored Gothic architecture seemed like a place straight out of the Harry Potter books that his teenage children devour. "It's medieval and high-technology all at once," he said. "It's absolutely marvelous, and something that everybody in France should see."