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On Wednesday morning, a congregation gathered under a cathedral's soaring roof and began the day by getting quietly ripped on champagne. The cathedral may be a train shed – the newly refurbished St Pancras International, home to Eurostar's high-speed London-continental rail line – and the congregation a group of well-dressed business travellers, but the mood was as close to spiritual transcendence as modern commuting allows.

On the day the station reopened, there was something both jolly and antique in the air. Strangers flirted. Older women, perfectly powdered, sipped their champagne only a few feet from the tracks. Occasionally, someone would look up at the sun-streaked glass roof – the largest single span in the world when built by William Henry Barlow in 1868 – and murmur, “It's splendid, isn't it?” For a prisoner rescued from death row, St Pancras is now magnificently alive. If that Lazarus act was not enough, it might now help to resurrect train travel as the glamorous, romantic alternative to the brute utility of air.

“Is this better than flying?” Russell Blackmore asks as he and his girlfriend, Karen Levy, drink Bollinger and wait for the 12:30 to Paris. “Is this better than being in line at Heathrow holding my shoes in my hand while someone tries to take a Lypsyl off me? I'd say so.”

Above our heads, Barlow's laced girders, restored to their original sky blue, support a pointed arch of glass. Bombed during the First and Second World Wars, St Pancras lost its glass, but its steel braces stood firm. At one end of the station is George Gilbert Scott's extraordinary Gothic revival pile, the Midland Grand Hotel, all towers and spires and spindly pillars, a castle out of a children's book. Its restoration will be complete in two years.

When the hotel and train shed opened 139 years ago, a newspaper described the complex as “the wonder of the age.” Now, says Alistair Lansley, the architect in charge of the renovation, St Pancras will be “the eighth wonder of the world.” Thank God the station is so vast; it might just be able to contain the boasting made on its behalf, tucked away between the farmers market and Europe's longest champagne bar.

For those of us raised in the Roman faith, there's nothing strange about mixing wine and church, even before lunch. So, fortified by fizzy, I step onto the 12:30 to Paris, walking past Greenpeace demonstrators who are here to support Eurostar's green initiatives (the trains to the continent are deemed carbon-neutral, a claim verified by Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth). One activist tells me to protest against the construction of the third runway at Heathrow; I tell him that if I never visit Heathrow again, I'll die happy.

“Welcome to an historic journey,” the conductor announces as we roll out of the station and into the heart of Europe's largest engineering project, which has been completed, improbably, on time and on budget. The station renovation and construction of a dedicated high-speed track from London to the Channel Tunnel cost more than $10-billion; the new route shaves 20 minutes off the London-Paris run, bringing it down to two hours and 15 minutes.

“We will be reaching speeds up to 186 miles per hour,” the conductor says.

Oops, not conductor. “On Eurostar, they're called pilots,” a fellow passenger whispers. Tony Buckingham is a stamp dealer travelling with his “covers” – collectibles postmarked in London and Paris to mark the first day of the high-speed journey.

Buckingham was on the very first Eurostar train, exactly 13 years ago, from Waterloo Station to Gare du Nord. “It was very different then,” he says. “There were lots of celebrities on the train, Jeffrey Archer, a fellow dressed up like a town crier and a little metallic man they called the Eurobean. Very strange, the Eurobean, but he became quite a star for a bit.”

We've pulled out of a tunnel into the flat, marshy lands of the Thames estuary. This is part of the 2012 Olympics site; these trains will one day carry visitors to the Games.

A fellow lurches by carrying two plastic glasses and announces, “Free champagne” Tony and I head to the buffet car, and as I make the difficult choice between saumon fumé and jambon et fromage, I think: I'm never flying again.

A choice

This summer, my husband and I decided, partly out of a shared love of trains and partly out of a sense that the $5 fares of discount carriers could not possibly reflect the actual cost of a flight, that we would shake our collective fist at the airline industry and ride the rails instead. I have taken small children on airplanes in Europe during the summer and I have two words for it: never again. I'd rather dig my liver out with a rusty spoon.

Our destination was a village an hour north of Rome, so the journey could be easily made in two hops – the Eurostar to Paris and then an overnight train to Rome. We arrived at Bercy station in Paris with a picnic to feed a rugby team, and we were not the only ones who had made this choice: All 18 carriages of the overnight to Rome were packed.

The kids, aged 2 and 6, loved sleeping on the train. The smallest thing – the concealed ladder, the drink holders, the restraining straps to keep them from dashing their brains out on the floor – delighted them. As we walked the length of the train, each compartment seemed to contain the seeds of a novel: a group of Japanese teenagers, giggling over a card game; three priests and a nun reading paperback novels; six people sitting silently in the complete darkness.

It brought me back to the trains of my childhood, when my mother would bundle all of us onto the overnight from Toronto's Union Station for our annual summer trek to Nova Scotia. I can't remember a single interesting thing that happened in an airport, but trains have offered no end of fun. There was the man who wandered through the carriage of our Greek train, carrying a sizzling tray of lamb souvlaki, only moments after we had run over six sheep. Or the bickering Irish couple who burst into Dirty Old Town as we pulled into Dublin's Connolly Station. Or the night I slept on the floor of a Yugoslavian train as a Black Sea of urine slowly crept toward my head from the overworked toilets. Nostalgia even lends a pleasant tinge to the starving journey through the Bolivian Altiplano on an ancient two-carriage beater that was fitfully heated, I swear, by a wood stove.

Nothing can compare with a train journey for the pictures it prints on your mind, whether it's a sun-drenched aqueduct in the south of France or a deer, silhouetted in black against a snowy New Brunswick field. What do you get to look at on a plane? The untrimmed ear hairs of the gnome in the next seat.

Stations like St Pancras might return rail travel to a more romantic era, when Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson rubbed fedoras under the glow of the platform lamps, but can trains compete with the sheer cheapness of bargain air travel? They can, in Europe anyway, if they appeal to travellers' green guilt and frustration with airport inefficiencies.

A new consortium called Railteam has pledged to improve rail travel across Western Europe by 2009 through a centralized booking service and passenger rewards.

Eurostar claims a journey on one of its trains produces one-10th the carbon emissions of a similar journey by air. “People are genuinely concerned about their carbon footprints,” says Stephen Jordan, managing director of London & Continental Railways, the company behind the St Pancras expansion. “They want choices, and for many that choice will be to take the train.”

We are there

Train 9024 from St Pancras International pulls in to Gare du Nord after two hours and 19 minutes to a deafening silence. There was going to be some kind of welcoming ceremony, but a good number of Paris's public-sector workers have decided to put down their tools to protest against the government's pension overhaul. The contrast between the elegance and efficiency of St Pancras – I was through passport control and security in five minutes – with the chaos outside Gare du Nord is striking (a pun seems the only way to deal with labour strife).

A few hours later, we return to London. Suddenly, it does feel possible to achieve the hedonist's dream – a lunch, perhaps even a naughty rendezvous, on the continent, then back again for dinner. We streak toward London, perhaps reaching that promised 186 mph, only slowing as we near the station. Old St Pancras church is visible through the window. When Midlands Railway built the original tracks in the mid-19th century, hundreds of bodies had to be disinterred from its graveyard and moved to outlying cemeteries. A young architect's assistant named Thomas Hardy supervised the work, an episode that marked him for life – and cast a certain pall over his writing.

Back at the station, there's still a good crowd at the champagne bar, though they don't appear to be the same boozers from 12 hours before. “Meet me at St Pancras” is the station's slogan, and its developers seemed to have taken careful note of Grand Central's successful rejuvenation in New York. As well as the champagne bar, St Pancras will soon host a combination of high-end shops and more specialized retail outlets like a fishmonger and a daily farmers market.

Those shops will all be located in the station's undercroft, built originally as a giant beer-storage hall, and more recently, as the station fell into disrepair, a bleak underworld where prostitutes and druggies hung out. When Alistair Lansley took on the restoration job, he says, “it was a real mess.”

It's amazing that it was still standing at all. The station, in all its whimsical Victorian glory, fell severely out of favour with prevailing tastes in the 1960s and was in constant danger of being torn down. For a while, British Rail used the hotel for office space, but then it stood empty and abandoned, loved only by ordinary Londoners, train buffs, conservationists and the performance artists who would break in and hold “happenings” in its decaying rooms.

It was poet laureate John Betjeman, along with the Victorian Society, who lobbied and wheedled and twisted arms and managed to save St Pancras. It wasn't only Betjeman's hard work that saved the grand old lady, though. While the management of British Rail was for many years bent on demolition, some of its executives, like Bernard Kaukas, fought diligently to save her. Kaukas, retired 20 years, watched the unveiling of the John Betjeman statue in the station's forecourt and says he never expected this day would come. He never expected to see St Pancras restored to its original state, the wonder of its age. “Do you know that phrase ‘gobsmacked?'” he asks. “That's how I felt when I came in here today. Gobsmacked.”

Take the train

Reservations

For information or to book a seat, visit www.eurostar.com or call 011-44-1233-617-575 (there is a £5 fee for telephone bookings).

Destinations

Direct from London: Lille, Calais, Paris, Disneyland Paris, Brussels, Avignon; 17 daily trains from London to Paris, 10 from London to Brussels.

Fares

London to Paris, from $118 (non-flexible) to $1,146 for a fully flexible Business Premier ticket; London to Brussels, from $118 to $1,106.