BAA and the Railed Requirements of Heathrow

1. WRATH plans unveiled:

   http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-31163002

   [Large extract deleted. PoP]

2. @NGH – I reread the material carefully – no mention of sources of finance or any quantified benefits. And nothing on service patterns – just a bit of pre-election recycling of old fluff, therefore?

3. Re Grahm H

   Todays announcement looks like another notch up the GRIP 4 to 5?

   GRIP background: http://www.networkrail.co.uk/aspx/4171.aspx

   Funding – not sure how true this is (mid 2012):
   http://www.railway-technology.com/news/newsuk-government-invest-500m-heathrow-rail-link

   UK secretary of state for transport Justine Greening said that the government is providing funding for a new rail line from the Great Western main line near Slough to Heathrow, which could provide significantly improved connections from the Thames Valley.

4. @ngh – well, maybe or maybe same old same old. A bit like West coast modernisation in the eighties – announced every year, and in a good year, twice? If it’s to open by 2021, we ought to see financial provision, not to mention a TWAO soon.

5. There has been nothing said by Heathrow itself, so we can assume that the only actual news is that some locals are being consulted.

6. According to Network Rail last year a Development Consent Order is being sought; enabling works were then scheduled to start at the end of 2016. The latest information shows a formal public consultation this summer and work starting spring/summer 2017.

7. LB Hounslow have published a consultation into a “Garden City” to be based next to Heathrow Airport.

   It includes a proposed “Bedfont” train station as part of a southern rail access to Terminal 5 scheme http://www.getwestlondon.co.uk/news/west-london-news/first-images-unveiled-heathrow-garden-10683467

8. I hope it’s actually a *railway* station…

9. Nope, it’s a train station

10. Hmm. We must fight against this Americanism…

11. A few observations.

    This is a different airport railway to those previously proposed via Staines. It is clearly intended to benefit the West of Borough development schemes discussed by Hounslow. The new route is closer to the former BR scheme which passed Bedfont Lakes on its way to T4, proposed at the 1978 T4 inquiry (it lost out then, the Piccadilly Line loop was approved instead). That in turn was an adapted and curtailed version of the 1960s Victoria-Heathrow Central BR scheme.

    The West of Borough consultation says the line would “continue north and then west to serve Terminal 5 at Heathrow Airport”, with connections there for other parts of the airport. There is an implication that it would pass close to but not serve T4 – the least used of the airport terminals. Whether it could or would tie in with WRAtH is not stated.

    At the Feltham end, the ‘Southern Rail Access’ as promoted by Hounslow Council would link with the Waterloo-Staines line “by the forming of new east and west facing junctions on the main line (between Feltham and Ashford) and then branching northwards towards the Airport following the line of Bedfont Lane to a new station which would be located at the Clockhouse Roundabout”.

    Note that there could be a triangular junction, so that this would be intended to replace the previous alignment west of Staines, for any trains aiming for Woking or Bracknell etc.

    Two stations not one, are proposed to serve the proposed major developments. One at Bedfont as stated above, another at ‘Bedfont Lakes’ on the Staines line between the two triangle junctions. The latter might raise operational complications.

12. All of this seems to assume that there is capacity on the Windsor Lines to add trains to this new branch………..

13. I must say I can’t see LBH (or even the GLA?) being left to produce and implement its own master plan for such a key site if it’s ever cleared.

14. Re JR,

    Bedfond Lane or Bedfont Road, the latter looks more likely given the illustrations on the news article?

    Looks like both junctions would be grade seperated and Bedfond lane LC (next to Staines station would get a bridge.

    Now a name for that other station between the 2 junctions “Feltham YOI” isn’t likely to make it to the short list but is the most apt…

15. @ngh
    West of Bedfont Road, by appearances, for the Bedfont Lakes station.

    If the road bridge shown is a replacement for Bedfont Lane LC, next to Feltham [not Staines] station, it appears to be alongside Grosvenor Park which is about 600 metres west of the present LC.

    Feltham YOurIe comes to my mind after the Christmas Quiz’s impossible question, though of course the yard was east of F stn!

16. Is this the same site that was proposed for an air-rail freight terminal?

    And was not the proposal for a Heathrow air-rail freight terminal (whether on this or another site) refused planning permission on the basis of its use of green belt land?

    And does this proposal not require green belt land, although it would generate less value?

    And are there not swathes of run-down housing around Heathrow that can’t be profitably redeveloped because of the combination of aircraft noise and no longer appropriate zoning / planning restrictions?

    I’m reaching for my inner Greg here. Ah yes, here it comes: ‘er, joined up thinking?’

17. Re Timbeau,
    The proposed Bedfont station in the illustrations looks a few cars short of 10 let alone 12…
    Agreed finding the paths for decent service level to the airport will be tricky but not impossible.
    Probably changes and different services/operators?

    Assuming they are SWT or successors from Waterloo:
    There is capacity on the Hounslow Loop but it is slower (Barnes-Mortlake LC being the political not practical limitation on the main route).
    NR’s Waterloo international and approaches rebuild will provide capacity there.
    The issue will be a coherent service pattern.

    Woking services – the issue would be those LCs near Egham that sank southern access the last time.

    Crossrail add service to T5 then extend either to Staines or Twickenham to avoid Egham area LC issues also minimal extra SWT services involved?

18. Re JR,

    Need some coffee should have typed Feltham not Staines…
    It being a new road bridge near Grosvenor Park makes sense rather than direct LC replacement make sense.

19. ngh

    Rail capacity: the evaluation of the first AirTrack identified the main benefits gains as arising from the provision of additional rail services, not the fact that they served Heathrow. Not necessarily the case with this proposal.

    Is there an problem with levels crossings, the issue that finally sunk AirTrack?

20. Waterloo International is already earmarked for expansion of service levels on existing routes, plus adding robustness by increasing platform occupancy / turnround times – no point providing ten coach trains if they don’t spend enough time in the platform for people to get to the far end of the train.

    “Barnes-Mortlake LCs being the political not practical limitation on the main route”

    It may be practical from a railway perspective to get more trains through there – although the mix of fast and stopping trains is probably the limiting factor – but considering transport needs in the area as a whole, any further increase in barrier down time would effectively close the roads altogether, resulting in a cordon sanitaire three miles long isolating Sheen and Richmond from any access to the north.

    However, it seems local authorities are powerless to stop NR disrupting road traffic by increased use of level crossings – and NR refuses to pay any compensation to the local authorities for expensive road projects needed to relieve the congestion so caused.

    But I can’t see this project happening any time soon. Simply an example of a local council having a lot of crayons.

21. timbeau
    If (a big if) Heathrow runway 3 is authorised, then increased rail surface access will be a requirement; and the money to fund it will be available. Perhaps also for level crossings. Our previous extensive discussion of Southern / Western access to Heathrow suggests that the only cost-effective method would be a single access route into Heathrow.

    So, yes, such a project could well be around the corner and, no, there does not seem to be a well thought through plan, either in terms of transport or in development.

22. Re A=42,

    There is a proposal (NR Route Strategy) for extra services being added via Hounslow loop in the future which would be at 50% of the airtrack level.
    One of the local MPs (PH the then SoS) wouldn’t entertain more crossing down time for fear of irate voters as there are 5 LC between Staines and the SWML most in his own constituency (Runnymead and Weybridge) if Woking or Basingrad – Heathrow services were added.

    Agree – Heathrow will need a massive increase in public transport if they want to build 3rd runway inorder to reduce NO2 emissions, getting their workers there will be key to achieving this.

    I’m also not entirely sure the Airport commission understood the Supreme court judgement as it came so late in their process.

23. A similar route from the Windsor Line to Heathrow also formed part of one of the rail options explored in the HASQUAD (Heathrow Access and Southwest London Quadrant Study) of the early 90s.

24. @ngh
    I’m also not entirely sure the Airport commission understood the Supreme court judgement as it came so late in their process.
    Please explain.

    NO2 emissions: as I understand it, Heathrow NO2 levels are above legal limits and therefore pose a potential legal obstruction to runway 3. Rail transport and public transport generally have a role to play in their reduction but, again as I understand it, there are more cost-effective measures that can be taken. Hence, most benefits of increasing rail access are directly transport-related.

25. Re A=42,
    “NO2 emissions: as I …”

    Agreed

    Whether a 3rd runway could be authorised without challenge if measurable action has yet to be taken towards reducing emissions, promises to do this or that probably aren’t good enough due to previous inaction to meet targets / promises on emissions which is what the case was about.

    There is also the “Wolfsburg” issue that has come to light since the judgement which means reducing road traffic will be more important than previously thought around the time of the judgement.

    Heathrow are currently mid way through it five year CAA regulatory period so the funding opportunities to make changes are limited to those outside CAA remit – like mega high Crossrail access charges… (DfT part funded 20% of the original HEx infrastucture in the 1990s so hence a little annoyance from them).

    Plenty of other non “transport” measures : removing onsite CHP, all electric vehicles airside but the emissions reduction will require measures on the roads .

26. ngh
    Since you seem to be very well informed, do you know if/how Heathrow’s CAA regulatory framework would be amended in the event of a summer 2016 decision to go ahead with runway 3?

27. Re A=42,

    Given the timescales mentioned for 3rd runway and extra terminal, probably wait till the next regulatory period. (Especially given the uncertainty of cost etc seen by the commission)

    The problem comes if they need to action things to reduce emissions without certainty of final R3 sign off (i.e. speculative spend to reduce emisions required after provisional but before final sign off) and Heathrow only partially (directly or indirectly) being responsible for emissions the narrow remit of the regulator may not be that helpful. (Why should transit passengers pay higher landing etc fees to offset emissions caused by Taxis going down the M4 etc. and similar issues with there regulatory arguing that government (DfT) should be paying to reduce non airport related emissions vs emission rules which tend to load responsibility onto the marginal emitter).

28. Re: ngh’s acronyms:

    CAA Civil Aviation Authority
    CHP combined heat and power generation, usually by burning something

29. I will resist the temptation to make base Music-Hall jokes about:
    …to load responsibility onto the marginal emitter
    Oh dear.

    Slightly more seriously, does this whole “emissions” business scupper the case for “3rd runway @ Heathrow” anyway?
    [Aspersions snipped. LBM]
    And it is relevant, because rail services to Gatwick & Heathrow & maybe between the two are going to be part of this whole scheme of things.

    [ What was that about joined-up thinking, earlier? ]

30. I think there remain both practical and political questions that need to be answered before any go-ahead can be given to a 3rd runway at Heathrow, especially as any decision (whether to go ahead or not) is likely to lead to a judicial review. On air pollution issues, the Davies’ Commission view that it didn’t matter what level of emissions came from Heathrow so long as these weren’t the worst in London (I paraphrase) is obviously challengable especially following the Courts’ decisions on the lack of an acceptable air quality strategy from the Government. Even if Davies’ principle is acceptable, the development of a UK air quality strategy means that there is a moving target for Heathrow to meet and this may not be achievable.

    In financial terms, I gather that there is still an unanswered question as to who is going to foot the bill for all the surface transport improvements needed to make an enlarged Heathrow even remotely acceptable in both congestion and air quality terms. As Gatwick is saying it would not need public money for similar improvements for a 2nd runway at Gatwick, the Heathrow initial approach that the public should pay for these improvements around Heathrow seems a little untenable. But clearly Heathrow Airport Ltd is trying hard to limit its expenditure in this area. See also its new challenge to TfL over Crossrail trains going to Heathrow Airport where they are insisting on a ludicrously high toll for each Crossrail train and passenger going into the airport.

    The surface transport improvements, though, have to be paid for by someone and if it’s not the passengers (and the airlines have categorically refused) then it will have to be the tax-payer.

    There are also the 2 Davies’ stipulations that Heathrow Airport has so far refused to accept, notably: no night flights and no pressure for a fourth runway. If the Government gives the go-ahead for a 3rd runway without accepting these stipulations they will look as though they have just folded in the face of Heathrow Airport, but if they keep them, Heathrow Airport might just say that there is no adequate business case on that basis and refuse to build anything.

    Finally, the political case was always going to be difficult. The original idea of publishing Davies’ findings just after an election gave a possibility (albeit tight) that the Government could approve the outcome and get beyond the point of no return before the 2020 general election. Postponing a decision until the summer of 2016 (at the earliest) makes that so much harder. As someone who ought to know, told me this week, a decision to go ahead with runway 3 is now unlikely ‘this century’.

31. The DfT seem to have their crayons out regarding long-term transport requirements for Heathrow. The article leads with the idea of double-decking the M25, but there are rail proposals in there too:

    The article, repeated by the Daily Mail, ITV, and Evening Standard, claims secret proposals are being drawn up to build either elevated carriageways or even additional lanes tunnelled under the existing M25.

    […] The Times says the proposals are among more than 250 radical ideas longlisted by Highways England. Others include a 35-mile high-speed rail line between Gatwick and Heathrow airports and a new link from the west coast mainline — which serves Glasgow, Manchester and Birmingham — directly in to west London destinations such as Heathrow.

32. @John Elliott – how entertaining – consultants’ long-list blue skies thinking is – in my experience – apt to come from a fact free venue in which costs and political deliverability do not exist. I wonder how much they think 24m of bored tunnel for 4 lanes of traffic replete with ventilation, escape routes and tunnelled access would cost. HS2 a mere bagatelle… Nice to see that HE [Highways England – LBM] have also thought about the link to Heathrow (perhaps they hadn’t noticed the HS2 decision) – still, nothing like joined up thinking!

33. What is the actual, you know BUSINESS case for Heathrow extension?
    Compared to Gatwick, f’rinstance?
    The whole thing appears ( & I stress appears) to be driven by Heathrow-vested-interests shouting loudly, rather than any actual case.
    And when does the moratorium on Gatwick’s expansion end?
    And, very importantly, which is going to cost less – Gatwick, surely, unless I’m horribly wrong.
    And that’s without re-opening the can-of-worms regarding pollution of both the noise & chemical varieties.

34. @Graham H

    “consultants’ long-list blue skies thinking is – in my experience – apt to come from a fact free venue in which costs and political deliverability do not exist.”

    To pick up on Graham’s excellent observation, LR is not the forum for discussing blue sky thinking regarding this, or any other, floated concept. Kudos to all of the regulars who have restrained themselves.

    And an honourary Moderator Badge for Graham today!

35. Re Greg,

    Business model: Heathrow need to increase their Regulatory Asset Base (RAB) as much as possible (using lots of debt).

    Gatwick moratorium expires 13/8/2019. West Sussex and Crawley councils side of the bargain was to safeguard everything between the airport and Crawley to allow them to do it.
    The main caveat was that the existing passenger numbers had to reach at least 25m/pa first (which it has done).

    Their latest promise is effectively to keep the airport passenger fees at less than half Heathrow’s proposed ones till 2050… (But still ~ 20% more than Dublin are planning after they add a 2nd runway).
    The big question with Gatwick is how much the cough up for BML improvements… (See Sussex articles parts 1-14)

36. @LBM – I shall wear the honour close to my heart. Slightly more seriously, there is a question as ever when presented with a list of this sort and origin, as to whether it contains a marked or even hidden card. Hard to say, but there are enough straws in the breeze to suggest the card might be the allegedly fabulous M31 (outer M25) , last seen on a colleague’s wall c1975.

37. Re Graham H,

    I had the feeling there will some benchmarking against the silly to make other things more sensible but first you have to float the silly.

38. @ngh – ah yes, the black art of setting up the three card trick…

39. ngh
    Thanks – we knew that, but does everyone else.
    Which brings me back to a variant on my original question: why is it that the politicos seem (that word again) to be in thrall to the apparent Heathrow vested-interests & against almost everyone else’s ???

40. @Greg
    Heathrow is full and most of the other runways in the South East are filling up. About that there is little dispute. The question is what to do about it. Heathrow Airport and British Airways are at one in calling for a further runway at Heathrow, but, as you say, they have strong vested interests. What is also clear is that a third runway will be very unpopular with the neighbours and, together with all the additional surface access needed, could not be afforded by Heathrow’s customers. The business case argument, then, depends on the added value to the UK economy of the extra flights generated by a new runway.

    A lot depends on whether you believe the hub airport theory or not. It’s proponents say that you need to get enough connecting traffic into Heathrow to justify flights to a wider range of destinations. On this theory, a new runway anywhere else will be no good as you cannot get enough conectivity from dispersed flights around London. The argument as put forward by proponents is curiously twisted as they say that without a new runway Heathrow will wither and flights will just go elsewhere. The argument then tends to elide Heathrow and London on the same basis as ‘what’s good for General Motors is good for the USA’.

    Personally I don’t buy the hub airport theory and without it there is no business case for Heathrow to expand. But the Davies Commission did and their report goes to great pains (and great strain) to try and manufacture a business case for it. Proponents for Gatwick will say that they could only do this by using false arguments and dodgy numbers, and I suspect they have a point, at least in part.

41. quinlet: A helpful summary of where (allegedly) we are on the airports issue. I could add a reminder that whether or not Heathrow arguments are accepted, there is a connected but separate decision about a new runway for Gatwick. It is not just LHR /or/ LGW: “both” and “neither” are the other two possibilities. (And of course “neither” is the default situation pending a definitive decision).

    This recent revival of a fairly dormant thread is OK as long as we stick to the direct implications (and meaning) of the article cited by John Elliot above. Wandering off to replay the whole of the airports debate should be avoided, though.

42. quinlet & Malcom
    Thanks, that’s what I thought, then … Heathrow expansion will bring more pollution & noise, will be opposed by almost all local inhabitants & authorities, but has “Big Money” behind it (maybe).
    Why & how the Davies Commission bought that argument is probably not on topic ….
    Do the extra railed requirements of Gatwick ( &/or a possible 2-airport rail link) qualify for this thread, or not?

    [Probably not. There was an article about Gatwick rail access, probably one of PoP’s south London series, where extra rail requirements for an extra runway there would be more suitable. LBM]

43. The conclusions of the Orbit multimodal study of 2000 are relevant here:

    p. 12: From a purely traffic point of view there would be merits in constructing a new outer M25, and operating this as a tolled motorway. However, consideration of the environment impacts led to the conclusion that neither inner nor outer orbital motorways would be feasible… We therefore recommend widening most of the the present dual three sections on the M25 to dual four lanes…. This scale of widening… was based on the assumption that area-wide user charging would be implemented as soon as economically viable… If area-wide road user charging does not occur, the traffic demand on the M25 would be much higher and up to 7 lanes would be required over certain sections. However, in the absence of road user charging, induced and diverted traffic would quickly fill up the new capacity thus offsetting any gains that might be initially achieved.

    If you look at the map in the abstract you can see that the problem is that Heathrow sits on the busiest part of the M25, partly because it is a source of demand itself and partly because it is on the way for any traffic from northwest of London (ie most of the country) to the south. I think the authors of the study are entitled to say “I told you so” in relation to the consequences of the widening of the motorway past Heathrow without road user pricing, and their conclusion still stands for any further widening proposals being drawn up by Highways England. And that would be true regardless of whether a third runway happens or not.

44. Ian J 05.22 makes reference to the rest of the country, which I like to think might have figured in the Davis Commission’s thinking – Heathrow being relatively accessible from the north west of London; Gatwick much less so.

45. Malcolm 14 June 2016 at 21:59

    “neither” is a slow economic crash.

    It is already possible to fly from Frankfurt to more destinations than from London.

    The longer it is before there is increased capacity for London, the more difficult it will be to catch up.

46. @Alan Griffiths – that is buying the argument that more destinations is better and fewer will lead to economic Goetterdammerung (and therefore beyond the scope of this thread).However, the assertion shouldn’t be left lying around unchallenged…

47. @Alan Griffiths
    The count of number of destinations is quite irrelevent partly becasue far more destinations are served by the London area airports than by Frankfurt, Schipol or Paris airports, and partly because it crudely assumes that an ageing turbo-prop flying to rnew destination is more important economically than a further A380 flying to an established destination. It is noteworthy that the first thing BA did on taking over the BMI network was to discontinue almost all the flights to central asia destinations so that they could use the slots to provide more services to established destinations in North America and the Middle East, thus reducing the numbers of destinations served.

48. Caspar Lucas
    Gatwick inaccessible from the N&W?
    That’s what Thameslink (when open) is for, surely?
    [Among other things, of course]

49. Graham H 15 June 2016 at 09:46

    “the assertion shouldn’t be left lying around unchallenged… ”

    Obviously I agree, at that level of generality. My friendly neighbourhood airport in the Royal Docks has added and given up routes quite often.

    The London problem is operating so close to capacity, notably at Heathrow, that there is very little room for adding destinations.

50. Quinlet, Malcolm & others. What does Virgin’s ‘Little Red’ experience tells us about Heathrow as a hub? AIUI, Virgin took some of the ex-British Midland slots to set up a feeder operation into its Heathrow services. This was unsuccessful, and the slots reverted to BA, because Virgin found that almost all Little Red pax were point to point and very few linked to Virgin Atlantic flights.
    At the risk of snipping, I wonder if we should be talking about Runway 3 at LHR. Is it really Runway 7 (or maybe Runway 4 since 23/05 remained available for crosswind landings until 2002).

51. @Alan Griffiths – Quinlet makes many of the relevant counterarguments to the “more destinations is essential to the economic survival of the UK” point, to which I would add only that on the basis of having worked for a variety of firms engaged in global businesses, the presence or absence of a direct flight was no obstacle to doing business – if you had to go, you had to go, changing as often as you had to; I would expect the same approach to be adopted by inward customers, too.

52. Heathrow Airport is still in the wrong place. It is in a heavily populated area and the majority of flights perform their final approach over thousands of densely packed homes.

    A disaster was narrowly averted a couple of years ago when the BA flight from China just managed to stay airborne up to the perimeter. A few hundred metres further out and it would have crashed on residential streets.

    Take this into account as well as the air pollution and it becomes obvious that the airport should be relocated.

53. @Graham H: Or even sometimes if a direct flight is available you might not want to use it, due to price, time or even seat availability. I have done LHR to Zagreb, via: Paris, Vienna and Munich in the past as well as using the daily direct flights.
    @Nameless: Such as the Thames estuary perhaps? Let’s not go there again. Heathrow will still, most likely, be the main airport for London, even after I’m gone….

54. GT 11.46: I’m intrigued by your suggestion that Thameslink provides equivalent accessibility to Gatwick as Heathrow from significant places to the north and west of London. For clarity, I’m referring to the West Midlands, Greater Manchester, or Merseyside. While obviously other airports are preferable, if the logic behind expanding London airport capacity is that certain routes will only be found at London airports then hiding the relevant airport capacity to the south (or east) of London looks like rather poor planning.

55. @Caspar Lucas
    Better connectivity to Heathrow than Gatwick from West Midlands, Greater Manchester or Merseyside? Hmmm.

    West Midlands I would probably give you as there is a reasonable train service to Reading for onward connections by (currently) bus. In the future there is the (unfunded) promise of rail access to Heathrow from the west. But neither Greater Manchester or Merseyside have reasonable rail access to Reading. It’s slow and often/usually involves a change. It’s quicker and simpler to come into Euston and get to Heathrow via the circle line and Heathrow Express. On that basis it’s as simple to get to Gatwick via Thameslink and almost as quick. And from Leeds or Newcastle it is almost certainly easier to get to Gatwick than to Heathrow.

56. Quinlet 21.43: I suspect most people would go by road all or at least part of the way – so now which is easier? The potential gamechanger in favour of rail access to airports is HS2/Crossrail to Heathrow via Old Oak Common (I realise this is yet to be proved). Interestingly this aligns with the operating hours at Heathrow which largely coincide with train running hours. No point going to the airport by train if you’re liable to reach the station on your way back when no trains are running (or vice versa).

57. Nameless: Thing is, LHR was there before the “heavily populated area(s)” were. When those “densely packed homes” were built they already knew of the existence of one of the world’s major airports. A stronger argument about airport expansion would have been that those too-near housing estates should not have been built in the first place.

    For those interested in the earlier-mentioned M31 more can be found at http://pathetic.org.uk/unbuilt/m31/

58. @Alison
    “LHR was there before the “heavily populated area(s)” were”
    Au contraire
    If this link works, it should show a map of Hounslow in 1937
    http://www.sabre-roads.org.uk/maps/tile.php?l=lmot&z=13&x=4087&y=2725

    [link fixed by Malcolm advised by timbeau]

59. Alison: So your argument is that to avoid the danger of final approach over houses, the houses (having been built later) should be demolished?

    (Actually I’m not sure that all the houses were built after Heathrow became “one of the world’s major airports”, but that’s yet another digression into history which we probably do not need).

60. Still not what I wanted – suffice it to say that much of Hounslow and Isleworth’s housing stock is inter-war, and the approach path stretches back as far as Richmond and Putney, where much of the housing dates back to before the Wright Brothers!

    @Caspar Lucas
    “I suspect most people would go by road [from Manchester] all or at least part of the way ”
    Really? From that distance I’m not so sure – and many would be staying over in London anyway to be sure of catching their flights.
    If HS2 becomes a reality, then Heathrow will be one change at OOC – but Gatwick will be one change too, as XR2 will make one interchange of “Euston Cross”. The direct trains to Gatwick via the West London Line might also resume at some point.

61. timbeau, who says ‘ as XR2 will make one interchange of “Euston Cross”. ‘ may need reminding that building the CR2 platforms (together with any associated renaming) will not cause the WCML/HS2 and Thameslink platforms in the area to move one centimetre closer to each other than they already are.

62. My perception is that the North-of-England to Heathrow bird has already flown. From the north of England, most people either use direct flights from MAN, or if such do not exist, they change at another hub such as Frankfurt or an American or Gulf hub.

63. @Malcolm
    I was aware that the Thameslink platforms will remain exactly where they are at “Mornington Crescent East”, but there are plans to facilitate HS1/HS2 interchange which will, as a by-product, improve interchange between Euston and the whole KXSP complex. In any case, it is partly a matter of perception – how far apart will the various elements of OOC be?

    Rename the various parts of Euston Saint Cross as the West, North, East and International terminals and most people will happily treat the whole thing as one interchange, just as they do between Terminals at Heathrow.

64. @Alison – that wasn’t the whole M31 story by any means…the concept was for a more or less complete “outer M25”. Besides the A329(M) – and note well that motorway’s northern extension – there is also the Blackwater Valley route as a relic of its planned routeing. Had the highway planners found a way through the AONBs and NT property and smaller towns, it would have swung south and east of Guildford roughly parallel to the A272. and so on through the Weald of Kent….

65. The Blackwater Valley road is considerably further west than the proposed route of the M31, which would have hit the A3 near Wisley.

    Various bits of both Ringways 3 and 4 did get built, apart from the M25 which uses parts of both. Look at the A312 east of Heathrow, running up to Hayes, for example (part of Ringway 3) or the A130 between Chelmsford and Canvey,( R4).

    The awkward kink in the M25 between South Momma and Kings Langley, actually the old A6) marks the transition between the originally planned Ringways 3 and 4.

66. @ Alison (W?)
    Even up to the 1960’s, there were several minutes between landings, aircraft weighed less than 50t, wingspan under 40m and well under 100 pax. Now landings 90 seconds apart, 400t+ common and 80m wide containing 400+ people.
    Yes, lower likelihood of major crash but the consequences of a single such incident would be sufficiently horrific for people to qustion the wisdom of soting a major airport in a built up area.

67. @timbeau – you are talking about the M31 as an M4 M3 A3 link; I’m describing the scheme as it started out. The plan was to have both what became the M25 and a further Ringway beyond that, between the M25 and the M27 (which was supposed to stretch all the way from the Solent to Dover). To the north,the A329 (M) was supposed (dotted lines on the map) to run up through the Chilterns to meet the M1 (no M40 at that stage). Highways planning in the ’50s and ’60s was quite a formalistic process – “Radial routes from London, Ringways and boxes round London, and spurs off that structure to the major ports”. Heathrow didn’t figure on their radar – volumes were very low by comparison with today – a bus service from Addington Street (later from WLAT) was all that seemed necessary.

68. Re Graham H,

    By the way – the M31 bridge plans over the Thames at Caversham have recently got dusted off again…

    (Reading East bypass proxy)

69. quinlet 15 June 2016 at 21:43

    “But neither Greater Manchester or Merseyside have reasonable rail access to Reading.”

    Hourly train Manchester Piccadilly to Bournemouth calls at Reading. Too many stops to be considered fast.

70. @Graham H
    What dates are we talking about. The well-researched and comprehensive “Pathetic Motorways” site to which Alison linked, and also the CBRD site http://www.cbrd.co.uk/articles/ringways/

    show the Wisley-Reading link, but no Ringway outside Ringway 4. (which, to the south and west of London, became the M25)

71. @timbeau – the map I have in mind is the one displayed on the wall of the then Chief Highways Engineer in DoT c1975-8. (I was particularly interested in it, as I was planning to move to the area idc…)

72. Patrick Abercormbie in 1944 selected Heathrow as the site for London’s main international airport on the assumption it would sit between his proposed orbital express arterial road, his orbital outer parkway, and the main roads to the southwest and west (see map here). He also assumed it would need an express rail connection (to Victoria, also in the map). Presumably by the 1970s such foresight had been quietly forgotten.

    The really amazing thing is that Heathrow was chosen as an airport site in 1944 and opened to the public in 1946. Things certainly moved quickly in wartime.

73. @timbeau – I should perhaps have added that the question of upgrading the Blackwater Valley route piecemeal to motorway standards occupied successive TSG settlements for much of the ’70s. Although by then it was obvious that there was no money and little political appetite for motorway expansion, my Highways colleagues hoped to progress by the usual salami tactics. They didn’t revise their strategy,however, and there was no updating of the strategic framework against which they were working. As I remarked, it was a formalistic approach,not one based on transport planning/modelling (that was pretty well unknown in the ’50s) and the schemes that emerged were usually defined by the need to compromise on money – like the Ringway 3/4 fudges that you mention.

    The highwaymen hoped for better times when Mrs T took office; in that, they were sorely disappointed because however much she loved cars, she loved cutting expenditure even more, and the railways (despite her predilections) were largely protected.

74. Ian J: when it opened, the terminals were in tents. And it was an airfield before the War – the government requisitioned it from Fairey…

75. @MPJ
    Not on the same scale as now, though, it was much smaller when owned by Faireys!

    It was a 1943 War Cabinet which determined Heathrow to be the future main airport, initially authorised for Air Transport Command, and to have 3 parallel runways in each triangular direction, so 9 runways in total. That’s why the M4 runs where it does through Osterley Park – that was to be the re-located A4, on the northern boundary of the new airport and with 3 E-W runways tiered south of that.

    Prior to WW2, Heston was to be the Air Ministry’s preferred passenger airport (it’s now the M4 service area) and due to open in 1942, served by airport buses along the A4 and Cromwell Road extension. A GWR diesel railcar scheme from Paddington, branching at Southall, was dropped before airport work began.

    The City of London’s Fairlop Airport was due to open in 1941 (to be served by the extended Central Line), following a 1935 public inquiry.

    Southern Railway and Imperial Airways were planning for portion working off trains from Victoria (IA air terminal) to Maidstone, splitting at Lullingstone to serve a new airport branch to London airport no.3. The site is now on the Swanley-Sevenoaks section of the M25 – another join-up section between former Ringways 3 and 4…

    Truly what comes around goes around.

76. @Ian J
    Not that amazing when you consider that the existing airfield site was requisitioned from its owner without compensation. I believe that wo of the three runways were not quite complete on opening and the passenger facilities comprised a large tent with garden chairs. Hangars would have been assembled from RAF standard prefabricated kits.

    There were 63,000 passengers in the first year.

77. When I found out a few years ago that an airport had been propsed for Lullingstone… my gob was smacked beyond belief. http://www.kentrail.org.uk has pictures of the still-surviving platforms that were built to serve it.

78. “There were 63,000 passengers in the first year”

    A number which could be handled by one single deck bus making two round trips a day to and from the west London Air Terminal. You can see why a Tube connection would have been seen as an unnecessary extravagance.

79. OK, maybe I’ve slightly misunderstood the LHR construction timetable* in the past, but certainly a lot of the building in the area to the East of the airport is post-becoming operational in 1930.

    Presently, I’m loving the auto-correct (auto-wrong) of Timbeau’s “M25 between South Momma and Kings Langley” :O

    The map he links to, though, actually shows how un-builtup the area was, being mostly market gardens (plus, of course, the barracks). So far as aircraft movements are concerned, they plateaued out around 20 years ago**.

    * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Heathrow_Airport
    ** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heathrow_Airport#/media/File:London_Heathrow_Statistics.png

80. I don’t think it really matters which got there first, the airport, the hoards of passengers, or the houses. Nameless’ initial point, that having houses immediately under the final approach and/or initial climb zone is a bad thing. Perhaps not sufficiently bad to require the airport to close, but certainly a valid reason when added to various other reasons to consider a total replacement.

    We will have to see what happens if the most prominent former advocate of a Thames Estuary airport should “happen to” be in the right place for the reins of power to drop into his hands.

81. I knew they had wings, but how long a runway does a fairy need?

82. @Jonathan Roberts: Prior to WW2, Heston was to be the Air Ministry’s preferred passenger airport (it’s now the M4 service area) and due to open in 1942

    Surely Heston had already opened as an airport in the 1930s? Hence Neville Chamberlain giving his “I have in my hand a piece of paper” speech there after returning from Munich.

83. @Nameless: I believe that two of the three runways were not quite complete on opening

    That’s still a hell of a lot quicker than it will take to build the next runway at Heathrow. And regarding requisitioning of the land, yes, that was what I meant about wartime.

84. @timbeau: You can see why a Tube connection would have been seen as an unnecessary extravagance.

    Judging the future demand for an airport on the basis of the first year’s usage at a time of draconian currency restrictions on overseas leisure travel (plus a lack of attractive leisure destinations in Europe given the late unpleasantness) might have been the kind of sophistry the Department of Transport would play, but there was a clear intention on selecting the site that it would have good road and rail links.

85. @IanJ
    While Heston existed, it was to be rebuilt and enlarged in the 1939-42 period, with longer runways and modern facilities. Useful details here in the section about expansion plans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heston_Aerodrome .

86. @timbeau “I knew they had wings, but how long a runway does a fairy need?” Actually, Fairey were one of the key players in the development of radar during the last war. A family friend who worked for them was one of the leading mathematicians behind that work – his family lived in Burns Way in Heston where it used to amuse me as a small child brought up in the dense urban fabric of Ealing to find you could walk out of their garden into a ploughed field.

87. Fairey
    Builders of the legendary Stringbag – my old geography-teacher had flown in them in WWII.
    The F Gannet too & the Rotodyne, a predecessor, many years ahead of its’ time of the Boeing Osprey. As well as an experimental very high-speed delta aircraft the FD2

88. If they had built a branch line off the GWML to Heathrow in the 1940s then we may have had the madly bizarre conjunction of steam trains meeting passengers off jet planes in the following decade.

89. [Off topic, but too good to not comment].
    @Fandroid
    Well it remains possible to take an electric or diesel train to Gatwick for a jet to the Isle of Man, walk 200 yards from the airport to Ronaldsway Halt, and then hail a steam train to stop (as it is only served on request).

90. @man of Kent

    I have done the exact reverse of that – used the steam train to Ronaldsway in order to catch a flight.

91. Sometimes, these whimsical connexions cause trouble – recently,I flew to Tallinn; knowing that the Ulemiste tram route was a short step away (but across a busy dual carriageway), I set off on foot. This puzzled the local police who couldn’t understand why anyone should (a) wish to cross said road, and (b) why anyone should leave the airport on foot. They put it down to English eccentricity (which it probably was).

92. @Graham H: Similarly I was most surprised to find that Bucharest (Otopeni) has a bus to the central city… I have flown into there many times and always left by taxi. It hadn’t even occured to me to look for a bus!

93. @Fandroid the Staines-West Drayton branch was available for development at the time, now disused and severed by the M25. Save for the stub to Colnbrook.

94. The stub to Colnbrook does in fact serve the airport, as that is how much of its jet fuel is delivered.
    It was also used for some of the material used in the construction of T5.

95. The problem is that when Heathrow was opened as a civil airport, T5 wasn’t on anyone’s agenda and its site was occupied by a sewage sludge works. Hence the Staines West branch was a long way from any original terminal buildings which were situated adjacent to the Bath Road, presumably located somewhere near the current entrance to the tunnel which accesses the central terminals area.

96. Well it looks like crossrail to Heathrow is safe. The ORR has told Heathrow to sling it’s hook and can not charge more than the common charge (£138 per train) and not charge for historical construction costs (an extra £500 per train on top). I wonder if that means that Travel cards will be valid, once crossrail opens?

97. @ Rational Plan – ooh interesting. I wonder what HAL will do next to try to squeeze money out of Crossrail passengers? Something tells me this is not finished as an “issue”. I also don’t see Travelcards becoming instantly available over the BAA infrastructure. Even with PAYG there are issues because of the Heathrow “freeflow” arrangements meaning open platform access. If you have differential fares for different services then the only way you fix things is to fully gate off HEX at Paddington so there is a defined way of ensuring the higher fare for HEX is paid. You also really need all of Crossrail to be gated and I’m not sure that is feasible at every Crossrail station (I’m unfamiliar with stops out West). I suspect gating off the HEX platforms at Paddington is not terribly easy because of the rear stairs and ramp. There would undoubtedly be demands for TfL / Crossrail to pay for any such works because it is only the arrival of Crossrail that is causing the change not HEX itself.

98. Well, Heathrow’s third runway is now dead. Runway saturation and demand have not changed overnight but construction can no longer be financed.

99. Re Answer=42,

    I can see the decision being deferred till after there is a new PM and the bond pricing moves this morning certainly don’t look good for financing R3+T6.

    Re WW,
    Agree this ain’t over.
    I suspect if the money making options aren’t as good on HEx they might just pull the plug when the track access rights on the GWML fast expire in 2023.
    And NR are doing the development work on the Western Access, so Heathrow don’t have too many cards to play.

100. HAL have already moved this year to squeeze a little more out of their HEx passengers. They have introduced a £2 peak surcharge on weekday mornings. It’s possibly also geared to getting more online customers and less need for ticket selling staff as the surcharge doesn’t apply online.

     I suspect that NR would be happy to include the HEx access within the gated area at the western footbridge at Paddington as it would simplify the rather complicated setup that’s there now.

101. @ngh
     I had always assumed that HEx was doomed, in any case. While the competition was just Heathrow Connect or the Piccadilly line, HEX can prosper. It’s more frequent and faster than Heathrow Connect and a change is needed in either case at Paddington. The Piccadilly line is so much slower it’s painful. Once the Elisabeth line is open, it may be slower than HEX but there’s no need for a change at Paddington, and for many that will be one fewer change which will offset the slower journey.

102. @fandroid
     NR might be happy to include HEx in the gated area but HEx certainly would not. Part of their business model is to sell tickets on board and gating would make this impossible.

103. Quinlet. In my own personal experience (a regular user), HEx do try fairly hard to sell tickets to passengers before boarding by deploying teams of agents right inside the terminals (often before a passenger reaches the luggage carousels). They no longer take cash for on-board sales and now offer Railcard discounts for online sales, so are clearly in the process of changing the whole ticketing setup. One thing would mitigate against gating at Paddington- the online options don’t produce any gate-readable tickets. In fact all ticket checking is now done by QR code readers (or something similar).

104. Fandroid refers to ” ..agents right inside the terminals.. ”

     Such mis-selling (as I would describe it) is, sadly, common worldwide. But I suppose it’s only like “convenience” shops. Competition only works well where there is proper information and proper choice – things which are naturally disliked by the competing sellers.

105. Fandroid @ 0843

     “One thing would mitigate against gating at Paddington- the online options don’t produce any gate-readable tickets. In fact all ticket checking is now done by QR code readers (or something similar).”

     The gates at Kings Cross could read the QR code on my Virgin East Coast ticket without any problem when travelling earlier in the year. I believe that the same thing works on smartphones (for those who have them), so it should not be a problem for there to be such gates at Paddington if desired.

106. Malcolm. I don’t see the presence of those agents as miss-selling. They offer a convenient and quick way of buying a HEx ticket. There’s no hard sell and I often take advantage of their presence.

107. It may not be mis-selling, but it could be abuse of a dominant (monopoly) position if operators other than HEx are not permitted to sell, or at least advertise, their competing products on the premises of HAL.

     They also have to be careful how they advertise – for example HEx is not the quickest way to much of central London: their advertising tends to compare with taxis (which HEx beats on both price and speed) rather than the Underground.

108. @ Timbeau – putting it politely let’s just say there has been “concern” about how HAL “promote” their service to the almost total exclusion of all others at Heathrow. This is particularly irksome at T5 given the provision of the infrastructure was funded by HAL but other modes have to pay them back over decades! No concept of impartial retailing there but of course HEX is not formally part of the National Rail structure nor does it have impartiality obligations to LU. It’s up to the passenger to find their own way to the mode they want.

109. I’m not sure if TfL would think it worthwhile to place people inside the arrivals parts of terminals. At T5, once you get to arrivals, both HEx and the Underground are very obvious. From T2, the Underground has a big advantage as it’s a long trek past the Underground station to reach HEx. At least one of my colleagues cannot be bothered with the extra shoe leather expenditure in order to get to central London a bit faster. Judging by the numbers using the Piccadilly Line, I don’t think that the cost conscious passenger is being fooled at all.

110. I’m still not clear – and this is after talking to MTR Crossrail – if Crossrail is going to take over the Heathrow Connect T5 service or just the Heathrow Connect T4 as shown in the promotional literature at the moment.

     Given that MTR Crossrail will be running the stations FOR Heathrow Connect for a while, it seems odd that this hasn’t get been actually decided.

111. The Hex desk at arrivals in T5 also handles LU enquiries etc and Oyster card refunds. There are also national rail TVMs and LU TVMs in the same area.

     In the central terminal area, there are national rail TVMs at the Hex station. Oyster refunds are handles at the LU station.

     By the way, since 20/06, the Heathrow Connect service now operates to/from T4 .

112. Logic would suggest that Crossrail consistently serves either T5 exclusively or T4 exclusively, just so that occasional passengers don’t have to suffer the anxiety of wondering which service they are on. After all, there will be enough to worry about in simply getting onto a Heathrow train, especially if they are on a central London platform, at say TCR. There will be sufficient free trains provided by HAL from Heathrow Central to cater for transfers to the terminal that is not being served by Crossrail.

113. @ Fandroid / Briantist – I thought we’d done this before. Crossrail, as things stand today, will service T23 and T4. All the relevant maps on the Crossrail site show this. There has been political pressure from the London Assembly for Crossrail to serve T5 but nothing came of that at the time. No doubt as we get nearer to the opening of Crossrail / transfer of H Connect the issue will arise again. I also expect the nonsenses around access charges will no doubt emerge in another guise *if* someone decides to reopen the “Crossrail must serve T5” debate. While I can sort of understand the desire for Crossrail to connect with British Airways’ main terminal at Heathrow I don’t see there is any huge hardship [1] in asking people to change at T23 from a shuttle.

     A similar situation pertains in Singapore where Changi Airport is not served directly by the MRT from Downtown Singapore. You must change to / from a shuttle service. Even with two new lines reaching near to Changi in the future none will give direct access to the Airport. A change one or two stops away will always be required to get there. I don’t why this is – perhaps they are reluctant to have any more rail tunnels under Airport property?

     [1] obviously some people laden with luggage may not find it hugely convenient.

114. @ WW 1845

     I think you’ll find that the Changi conundrum is strongly related to the taxi drivers.

115. @WW….I remember reading somewhere that the direct MRT trains to Changi from Singapore City were withdrawn less than two years after opening due to lower-than-expected patronage; most travellers continued to use taxis (which are ridiculously cheap when compared to London!) or private transport, and most airport workers continued to use the existing bus services to the airport. I suspect that if the MRT link had been open from the start (or before passenger traffic levels built up) at Changi, it might have been better used.

     Compare and contrast with the Heathrow situation, where the Picadilly line extension was opened when Heathrow had a fraction of the passenger traffic that it now handles, with rolling stock that had modest provision for luggage (which the MRT stock lacks), and remains well used to this day (judging by the numbers on the line lugging around trolley cases of various sizes!). HEx can try all they want to attract the naive airside passengers who don’t have a clue how to get into Central London, but the cash-poor/time-rich/luggage-light/savvy traveller with no access to a car will more-often-not pick the Tube option (and eventually the CR option) to get into town.

     It would be interesting to see whether the patronage of a rail-based public transport option for an airport has any relationship with the time period between its opening and whenever the airport it serves originally opened, as well as the corresponding traffic levels at the time of opening. The ones I can think of whose rail access opened a lengthy period after the airport opened when its traffic levels were already high (e.g. Sydney, Brisbane) have not met traffic forecasts.

116. @anonymously

     Of course many visitors to London will have done the minimal research necessary to discover the Tube map, on which the Piccadilly Line is shown but HEx is not.

117. Timbeau -many people use the Piccadilly line because it gets them closer to central London or the City which is where a lot of them are staying not because of ignorance of the HEx/Connect services.

     If anyone asks me (or asks me on the various airline boards I post on) how to get to ‘London’ I ask them where they want to actually be and then advise but many people just respond ‘HEX’ even though that is (a) more expensive and (b) not always quicker to the end point. Same if they arrive at LGW – it’s always GEX even if Blackfriars or London Bridge is better for them.

118. @ Bob G – Interesting. I hadn’t thought about that but there is a very strong taxi trade in Singapore. And to link back to London many of those taxis are owned by Comfort Delgro who own Metroline Buses.

     @ Anon – I was unaware a through service had been offered initially. I nearly got caught out when I first used as I had no idea it was a shuttle. I nearly ended up going back to the Airport as I didn’t hear the announcement about needing to change. Three guesses as to what I looked like by the time I reached my hotel wearing a warm coat (necessary in London) having had to stand the whole way on the MRT and then having a fair trek with luggage from the nearest MRT stop at Orchard to my hotel. A “drowned rat” doesn’t quite cover it. 😉 I really don’t like using taxis but I’ve had to use them to / from Changi because the public transport offer is so poor / cumbersome. The only saving grace is that in 6 years time (!) a new MRT line and station will open very near to the hotel I usually stay at and it will be relatively easy to get to the airport using it. I suspect that if they had persisted with a through service it would have done pretty well as you suggest.

119. @Chris C,

     Undoubtedly the Tube is a better option for many, but the absence of HEx from the Tube map means that it has to try harder to be noticed at all.

     Although I suspect HEx’s main competition is the taxi.

120. Whether it has met traffic forecasts or not, I don’t know, but Manchester Airport’s station has good usage in my experience. That’s despite the rail link opening well after the airport itself. I suspect that the key to rail getting a good percentage of air passengers is its connectivity with a comprehensive rail network. Schiphol and Frankfurt’ s rail stations are very well used.

121. @WW: I don’t see there is any huge hardship [1] in asking people to change at T23 from a shuttle

     One difference with the Changi situation is that if I understand it correctly, Crossrail passengers from T5 will not be catching a shuttle as such, but rather going one stop on Heathrow Express (for free) and then changing to Crossrail at T23. That is a fairly complex message to get across to passengers arriving from overseas – “you can get on this train and then get off and get on on another train to get to central London, or you can stay on this train and change at Paddington. One way will cost X and the other will cost Y (but you will need to have already bought a ticket or tapped in if you wanted to pay Y)”. Clearly BAA don’t have any incentive to convey the message clearly, either: much more lucrative for them to just sell Heathrow Express tickets to everyone.

122. @Chris C: Yes, I was talking to a Canadian with a young baby on the train to Kings Cross on Sunday, they were planning to go to Victoria and use the GEX to go to Gatwick…. Not very nice with a pram and luggage. So I advised them to go to St Pancras instead and use Thameslink instead… No changes and much better access….

     I think they had probably also fallen for the ads….

123. @Southern Heights

     You never know on Sundays. I hope you checked Thameslink was running through the core that day?

     The NR Journey Planner will usually send you via GatEx as it is theoretically faster, unless you select the “minimum changes” option or specify “via Blackfriars”.

     (Incidentally, the JP will happliy send you out and back by different routes if you don’t specify a “via” option, it doesn’t allow you to specify a via option for one direction only – for example calling at Birmingham on the way back from Manchester (which is a valid break of journey, on a permitted route).

124. WratH proposals very positive it says here …
     [ Network Rail report ]

125. I still want to know if there will be grapes of WratH.
     Or if they changed the acronym to ward of such puns.

126. @ Alan Griffiths: I believe Messrs Furrer & Frey of Switzerland are even now researching & developing an appropriate product to an eye watering detailed specification from Network Rail. (See September 2016 ‘Modern Railways’ for previous adventures with this exciting product range). Unconfirmed reports suggest that the Mark II grapes will feature an unobtainium finish for added lustre.

127. WRAtH is now WRLtH…

     The GRIP process removes puns.

     Series 2 is made from slightly cheaper Almost Unobtanium.

     The F+F design avoids the scale of damage seen in the recent ECML dewirement.

128. ngh. Almost Unobtanium is that element 118 on periodic table?

129. It was thought that Element 114 (“Flerovium”) would be an “Island of stability” but this has turned out not to be the case ….

130. Some of the Southern Rail Access to Heathrow proposals suggest the future for the Heathrow Express is for it to be extended to Guildford and Basingstoke via a link to the Windsor branch and a curve at Staines.

     http://www.networkrail.co.uk/Southern-Rail-Access-to-Heathrow-Feasibility-Study.pdf

131. Seema Malhotra MP and Ruth Cadbury MP spoke in an adjournment debate in the House of Commons this October to promote LB of Hounslow’s southern rail access proposal from Feltham to Terminal 5 via an intermediate station at Bedfont Green:

     http://www.chiswickw4.com/shared/conswtrains014.htm

     There will clearly be tension in the future about whether any new train services from Terminal 5 should head to Surrey and Berkshire via Staines or towards south west London, especially given the limited train paths available on the existing rail lines.

132. evergreendam
     The re-iterated problem of the many level crossings & their effects on local road traffics remains unsolved, does it not?

133. In the above report, it states the realistic frequency or services is 8 trains an hour from T5 southwards. With 4 heading towards London on semi fast service, two via Hounslow two via Rixhmond. They’d basically break the Hounslow loop service and send them to the airport. To Surrey, the Weybridge service would be cut back in one scenario. To get 4 would require a tunnel and so Surrey services to Basingstoke and Guildford would miss Staines and Egham.

134. @ Rational Plan – I’m not well versed on all the bits of details that have scuppered so many attempts to give southern access to T5. However it seems we are likely to have a repeat of the usual “inside Gtr London” vs “outside Gtr London” clash of interests. I understand why the local MPs want a new line to raise PTAL levels at Bedfont and to access Heathrow for London residents but it cuts across other options does it not? It seems a shame that it doesn’t seem possible to have a through T5 service which can combine the different needs of southern access into the airport from the east and from the west of the Terminal. It’s also a shame that there are no obvious ways to alleviate the congested tracks as you get closer to London via Hounslow or via Richmond.

135. @WW/Rational Plan -throw CrossRail 2 (which is a relatively recent arrival in the area) into the mix and you have crayonista heaven. What would be disturbing would be letting Heathrow expansion drive a wider approach to planning transport on the western side of London, and in particular, letting the dispersed multi-terminal “planning” bedevil the layout of the rail system.

136. I haven’t followed all of the history on this, but it seems a shame that any rail link to the West of T5 cannot split to link up with both Reading line and the South West. That way, rather than splitting the Westbound Crossrail between Heathrow and Reading, all could go to Heathrow and then split between Reading and something to the South West (Guildford or Basingstoke perhaps)

     From a capacity standpoint perhaps that would need to see Heathrow Express reduced, but it would really help feed airport connectivity in the South East. Perhaps LHR would wear the reduction of Heathrow Express if it helped their pollution case towards a third runway

137. Stuart
     Very unlikely.
     According to the “the Times” (article behind a paywall, unfortunately) HeX/BAA/LHR are appealing the ORR’s judgement against them on “tariffs”/track access charges for trains using Heathrow & the relevant tunnel, though it’s gorn all quiet since the initial announcement … does anyone have any more recent/accurate information on this?

138. Why not CrossRail to Portsmouth and Penzance? Or Swansea…. One question that many don’t bother to ask – and should – is just how much rail capacity does Heathrow need? On any reasonable modal split, rail traffic is unlikely to exceed 3-5000 PAX/hr. Split that up amongst multiple O/Ds and apart from central London, numbers are going to be in the low 4 digit figures .

139. @Graham H: Well said! The demand for access to Heathrow is spread so far and wide that a single Southern access link wouldn’t really catch that many more passengers….

140. Oh, I certainly don’t think Crossrail needs extending further in distance terms than Reading. But I would think a key aim would be to maximise rail access over road given congestion and pollution concerns – and surely if existing services pass right by the airport, calling there makes sense. If you look at service patterns in the Netherlands, almost all services south from Amsterdam seem to call at Schiphol

141. @Stuart – ” if existing services pass right by the airport” – but they don’t (unless you do railway planning Paton-style with the butt end of a Churchill Corona and a 1:25 000 000 map of Europe). The “only a few kilometres away” argument is a recipe for spending, err, bigly.

     Another issue is the number of extremely local journeys generated by Heathrow workers and support industries. These almost certainly exceed the demand from passengers . Rail is not well suited to these trips which have multiple origins in W London and multiple destinations around the airport estate and surrounding areas (eg engineering bases, hotels, and the like). The buses have it, if anyone does.

     An easy way of looking at all this is to compare the populations involved – GWML as far as Bristol – about 1.5m tops, Hants as far as the Solent 1.m, W Surrey/W Sussex as far Portsmouth 1m. Greater London 9m. And bear in mind that that assumes that people in rural areas take a cab or drive to their nearest large station. For many, it’s as simple and less hassle to stay in a cab all the way – I pass dozens of well off-piste cabs every time I drive past Heathrow.

     I don’t think Schipol. however, excellent as it is, is a helpful example. It is where it is, no crayons were used to remanage the entire NS network. If Heathrow had been built next to the GWML or at Feltham, it might have been a different story, of course.

142. @Graham H: In the late ’70’s the NS/Dutch government (IIRC) determined that anyone in the country would be able to access Schiphol by rail with only single change of train…. I believe this was meant to be an hourly service… So perhaps not crayons, but certainly ink was involved as a plan like that would not evolve accidentally!

143. @SHLR – but no railway lines were moved or built to achieve this? (If a better service to Heathrow was a matter of “simply” re-arranging existing services that’s one thing (although HAHA Ltd might think otherwise), building extensive new lines to cater for 1-2000 PAX/hr is another.)

144. @GH
     As SH points out, I don’t think the tunnel into Schiphol existed when it was just fields – even the Dutch wouldn’t see that as good value for money !

     My point is simply that Heathrow development will likely require an attempt to shift towards environmentally friendly public transport, i.e. rail based on today’s technology, and I think more could be done to achieve that

     Of course redirecting any number of rail lines to hit the airport would be a huge and probably wasteful cost, but it seems the existing Heathrow train link has already seen massive cost sunk, so surely building it out to the West (and South West) is a relatively low cost option; and capturing Heathrow staff from places such as Reading, Slough and other points between Hayes & Harlington and Paddington (and beyond) could be a major plus

145. IIRC Heathrow is the largest single site employer in the UK with about 75k employees so just those people on their own would generate over 30M journeys a year. 1 employee = over 200 passengers who fly once a year when it comes to journeys to and from the airport.

     Heathrow could do worse than simply improve cycle infrastructure to and within the airport as there are a significant number of employees who live within easy cycling distance but you’d need to be a bit mad to cycle there at the moment.

146. @Stuart – whilst no one would disagree with your basic intention, new tunnels cost just as much as they ever would, however much the cost of the adjoining tunnels is “sunk”. (Actually, the cost isn’t sunk, it’s sitting in the books quietly drawing down cash against depreciation and maintenance costs all the while…). Digging tunnels costs around £100m/km + fitting out costs, so think £250m+ for a km of fitted double track tunnelling. Getting out of the airport to meet the SWML would mean perhaps 10 of those km, say £2.5bn plus some fairly extensive surface works; somewhat less to go to Reading . There is a plan already in place for doing the latter but its business case is (a) weak and (b) dependent on hitching a ride on the Elizabeth Line. Look up references to the Wrath project (title may have changed recently). No such easy ride exists for SWML towards Basingstoke and Guildford, nor would anyone seriously expect Basingstoke punters to sit on a metro-style train from those places for an hour or so, quite apart from the operational nightmare of trying to integrate CrossRail with not only the GWML, GEML but also the whole of the SW outers. London Bridge and TLK a walk in the park. All this to provide through travel for around a thousand people an hour, if that.

     Wavy handy and using the word “surely” can’t magic the numbers, alas.

     So far as I am aware, punters between Hayes and Paddington already have a service to the airport. Those from points west can also do this with one change.

147. It’s a bit of a head-scratcher as to why light rail hasn’t apparently been seriously looked at for connecting Heathrow to its hinterland and to local rail stations. The car-parks and hotels provide a steady traffic into and out of the airport which is 100% served currently by diesel buses. Add in the staff movements and those who would transfer off heavy rail if only the local links were better! No crayonism invited, but having seen some mighty structures on England’s various light rail networks, there doesn’t seem to be a fatal engineering problem that would stop it. Perhaps light rail is too ‘old technology’ for a whizzy airport company.

148. @Fandroid

     No crayonism invited, but having seen some mighty structures on England’s various light rail networks, there doesn’t seem to be a fatal engineering problem that would stop it.

     The problem is that the terminals at Heathrow are located between the runways, and any access to the terminals therefore has to cross the runways. Building viaducts over runways* is not generally seen as a good idea, and although level crossings do exist (e.g Gibraltar) they are a bit of an operating constraint, so a tunnel it has to be – and that then becomes the main element of the cost. What you put in the tunnel is a relatively small part of the budget.

     * although Gatwick has a footbridge over a taxiway – http://s0.geograph.org.uk/geophotos/03/30/52/3305281_d3e010a6.jpg

     New runways can be built over existing infrastructure relatively cheaply, as is for example proposed M25/3rd runway crossing, and this may have been how Schipol did it. But it’s too ate for Heathrow’s existing runways.

     All-electric ground support vehicles is a worthy aim, but we are a long way from making any airport completely all-electric. Assuming battery technology continues to improve to the point where an electric widebody aircaft is possible, how noisy would it be? (bearing in mind that much of the noise of an aircraft is not the engine itself but the fans or propellors actually moving the thing through the air)

149. A tram (or light railway if you wish to avoid historic-sounding words) only wins over a bus if there are big numbers of people making journeys along the same corridor. Whereas the general mish-mash of desire lines around Heathrow (to-from terminals, work-sites, railheads, hotels, car parks and workers’ homes) bears more resemblance to a tangled web than a series of corridors.

150. Any light rail around Heathrow would likely have to be a high floor ‘tram train’ solution in order to share the existing rail tunnels and stations.

     For the LSWR main line, it might make more sense to extend the proposed western rail access services beyond Reading to terminate at Basingstoke, where interchange could be made to a plethora of western destinations. This could take over the current Reading – Basingstoke stopping service and provide regular new direct links between Basingstoke and Maidenhead, Slough in addition to the airport.

     Extending airport express service beyond Terminal 5/6 just to its own new bay platform at Staines could provide a very useful level of connectivity without troublesome additional paths over the SW Windsor lines.

     The Instead of using these paths for airport services, Waterloo-Weybridge service might be diverted from Weybridge via Woking to serve Guidford. This could provide a single change ride from these parts of Surrey to the airport via Staines.

     Network Rail’s report on access makes it very clear they do not prefer any direct approach from the south, e.g the Feltham route, due to the difficulty, disruption and and attendant costs of digging more major tunnels under the airport facilities and runways and somehow joining into the existing tunnels.

151. @MT – the intention for is for Wrath (or whatever they are to be called at the moment) services to be covered by an extension of Elizabeth Line services. Extending CrossRail to Basingstoke is exactly not what is required… err, surely… even if cost and traffic is no object.

     ” just to its own new bay platform at Staines ” -it’s that word “just” again – a close relative of “surely” – and, like it, devoid of analytic, cost, or market, content.

152. GH – while I don’t disagree with your overall argument, for the sake of accuracy I would just point out that the direct main line from Amsterdam to Leiden was built in the 70s (?) in order to give Schiphol rail access – the airport had none before then.

153. Timbeau – Phoenix airport’s light rail crosses a taxiway by a viaduct http://stuckattheairport.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/PHX-SKYTRAIN.jpg, and Gisborne has a railway level crossing http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-L_iXvIuFyXI/UbXPGfHSKnI/AAAAAAAAA_4/OI2kdwTntB4/s640/l.jpg – but whether either would work at Heathrow…

154. @GH

     I was using the term ‘just’ in the sense of ‘only as far as’, rather than to suggest any level of difficulty, although by definition running ‘just’ to Staines must be easier than setting up a complex network of services throughout Surrey and Hampshire, especially those tunneled options around Staines and Egham. Note this was one of the service options that was looked as part of Airtrack, so there’s probably some analysis somewhere although I have not seen it.

     I wasn’t aware a final service option have been agreed for the western rail access, whatever it’s called now. I do know that NRs Western route study recommended a strategy of combining services across Reading, in order that the number of terminating services using the relief side platforms is reduced. Terminating trains are assumed to occupy platforms significantly longer than train stopping and continuing in the same direction.

     Returning to airport connectivity at Staines, perhaps using expensive heavy airport express rolling stock to provide such a short distance link would be horribly uneconomic, and these trains would be the sole user of that southern connection in this scenario, unlike the Airtrack related proposal where the infrastructure would have been shared with the Reading, Guildford and Waterloo trains. A better, much more frequent and thus potentially popular shuttle link from Staines rail interchange might be provided by an automated people mover shuttle operation, a PRT or similar.

     I do try very hard not to utilise the words just, merely, simply etc in the context you describe. They are (just) meaningless 🙂

155. @Mike

     That Pheonix example looks like some sort of people mover technology rather than ‘conventional light rail’. Impressive nontheless!

156. @MT _ I didn’t mean to sound as harsh as it reads in retrospect. I agree entirely about reducing Reading terminators (but not if the price is CrossRail to Basingstoke); if I had had more time in the ’90s, I was determined to look at a rebuild of Reading to enable amongst other things, the Waterloo services to be projected across to Basingstoke, for that very reason.

     PRT etc to Staines – well, yes but I would caution against the demand. It’s easy to be taken in by the HAHA Ltd hype. Yes, they are big in airport terms, but in terms of individual flows between widely dispersed O/D pairs, very very few corridors would justify investment in much infrastructure. Even if it achieved a modal split akin to Gatwick, the total hourly movement to the airport would average out at something like <10 000/hr; deduct the major movements to London (3/4 of Heathrow's SE traffic source) and we are left with at best a few thousand /hr divided amongst many origins. It would be difficult to identify any single flow which averaged more than 200-500/hr.

     Even being kind, that 500/hr – say 2.5m pa – would be financially up against the typical £40-60 cab fare (usually split between more than one person) from Roseland to the airport, or self-drive or KNR trips.

     There's reportedly a runway with a level crossing in Oz, with the trains taking precedence; I will do some poking around. You can certainly drive across the runway in Pontresina in Kanton Graubuenden – I have done so several times – didn't notice any warning system other than Mk 1 eyeball.

157. Gisborne, New Zealand. (Website has nice pictures of steam locos passing across in front of – no doubt photoshopped – aircraft landing).

158. “Terminating trains occupy platforms for longer and reduce the number of services that can use them*

     But if all services are linked across Reading the terminal platforms (4a, 4b, or whatever they are called now) cannot be used at all!

159. @Timbeau – indeed, a better thought would have been to link the west and east bays to provide the through line. A rather unappealing bar and some loos would have had to go… I didn’t then and don’t now share the HSE/NR’s antipathy to third rail extensions.

160. @Timbeau

     Not all services, just those that use the relief side through platforms (#12-15). The SWT/Gatwick group now has 3 dedicated 12-car terminal platforms at the London end which handle the traffic well today. I fully agree with GH that it’s a bad idea to extend the Elizabeth any line further west, so that means there are likely to be two or four (peak) terminators an hour, which is probably manageable, but add another four from Heathrow and that is (even with quite short recovery layovers) probably tying up an entire pair of through platforms all day that might as well have been configured as London end terminal bays in that case, saving a lot of junction complexity at the west end throat. In addition to more efficient platform utilisation, cross-Reading services also create new direct journey opportunities that might be attractive to new riders.

161. @GH
     The Three Guineas, whatever its appeal, is housed in a Grade 2 listed ‘original Brunel station building’ . You could still go round it though, leaving the building marooned in the middle of a wide island with no street frontage, and thus no future as a bar. It might be reconfigured for ‘railside ‘ passenger facilities though.

162. Looking at the reports, no one is interested in Cross airport services that go from GWML and SWML for performance pollution reasons.

     All reports show that the actual increase in capacity provided will mostly be taken up by people going to non airport destinations.

     Not surprisingly the best performing options involve go to the new Waterloo – Heathrow services.

     Due to the nature of dispersed travel patterns to the airport, there is limited appeal to lots of infrequent services. The best option is a limited number of routes with high frequency. As long as though services interchange at big stations then the penalty for changing services to get to the airport is reduced.

     So 4 trains and hour to both Warerloo and Woking seems the best option.

     Ideally it would be much more, but capacity is limited, All studies note that the Windsor lines will limited to 20 trains an hour into Waterloo in the future.

     To get above this will require serious amounts of money, for such things as extra track between Waterloo and Clapham Junction, with extra platforms at intermediate stations. Somehow a third/ forth track between Barnes and either Hounslow or Twickenham would be needed. Not cheap, and so it looks likes these options have been consigned to the too difficult bin, I think they are waiting on a fall in passenger demand.

163. GH – as you’ve discovered, the airport with the railway level crossing is in NZ, not Oz. That stretch of railway is controlled by the airport people, so the planes generally have priority over the much- less-frequent tourist trains. (According to Wikipedia, trains had priority where the Belfast-(London)Derry main line crossed the runway at RAF Ballykelly, which sounds a bit odd for a wartime air base – but the railway was there first!)

164. If a Waterloo/SW route is felt worthwhile by Heathrow, then leave it up to them to raise the money and build it, It’s not like they haven’t done similar before.

     One does wonder if HMG made a mistake by creating Heathrow in the first plce and not just developing the Heston site after WWII.

165. @MT – yes,I’d wondered – but not looked into the detail – whether to go across the forecourt,with the bus station having largely decamped and dispersed soon after deregulation. That might require either some slewing or bringing the Reading South tracks into use by raising them somewhat.

     There may well be a cross-Reading market of some size – the business park at the former Suttons Seeds site seems to be accessed by a number of folk getting off at Earley, and the same goes for the biscuit factory site on the other side from Twyford. Certainly, there is a very high level of reverse commuting to Reading itself – the ex-Gatwick serice arriving around 0900 is always completely packed out, with Wokingham as the major boarding point, for example.

     @rational plan – a good summary. 4tph to Waterloo is probably enough, anyway, in terms of traffic offering, for the reasons stated.

     @Mike – 🙂

166. Re Mike and Graham H,

     The current Ryanair flights into Ballykelly still get regularly delayed by late running Belfast-(London)Derry train services as the track is only 5m from the end of the runway.

     As regards Heathrow you can guarantee that whatever Southern access proposal is decided upon it won’t sit happily with all parties (HAL / NR / DfT / LB Hounslow / Staines Residents.)

167. With the recent massvie rebuild of Reading station, any thoughts of joining the Waterloo line to the Basingstoke line has gone out of the window for a generation.

168. @jim cobb – I was writing about the early ’90s, of course; no one would suggest it now.

169. @Stuart, GH

     The rail link to Schiphol was initially a shuttle service from Amsterdam RAI and totally detached from the rest of the rail network. In the late 80’s the links were completed with a connection to the old main line from The Hague and a link around the western side of Amsterdam. I believe the line from RAI to link to the mainline from Utrecht was completed sometime in the mid-80’s.

     So there was quite a lot of building involved!

     At Gisborne (NZ) an aircraft landing outside of tower operating hours can use the radio to trigger the signals to stop any approaching trains (at least that was possible in the early 90’s). Visual indicators on the approach indicate to the pilot that the signals have been changed. As the line is now mothballed, this might not be required anymore…

170. @ngh
     Where Ryanair is involved it is easy to get confused about which airport is used, but flights use City of Derry Airport not Ballykelly. Both are effected by the close railway.

171. Building a southern link to Heathrow is not technically difficult and probably not that expensive. The closest point between the airport and the Reading/Windsor line is around Bedfont lakes, which is fairly open and undeveloped, so putting a line there and linking to the existing T4 station would be relatively easy and inexpensive. Additional tunnels under the Airport would be far more expensive, but doable. There is no spare capacity on the Reading/Windsor line, but potentially the Hounslow loop trains could be redirected to the airport so no additional track capacity would be needed. From the other direction, there is capacity west of Staines and there is space to install a third track between Staines and Bedfont lakes, if needed. There doesn’t sound much here that is terribly complex (compared to increasing capacity towards Waterloo), so why isn’t it being done ?

     If it was commercially viable, Heathrow Airport themselves would already have done it, or at least be strongly in favour of it, but that doesn’t appear to be the case. For traffic from London, there are already two rail routes, so is a third really needed ? For the other direction, it is difficult to see that there would be enough traffic to make it worthwhile. Heathrow is so well placed on the Motorway network, the preferred and quickest method from the south-west is to travel to the Airport by car.

     As Heathrow cannot expand any further at the moment, additional rail links are not cost effective as any traffic on them is just taking traffice away from another route. If you are after modal shift, then new rail links would do that, but that is a political decision, not a commercial one (unless Heathrow were forced to do it as an anti-pollution solution).

     When the 3rd runway and T6 are being built, further rail links will be required. I would suggest that a new line could be built starting with a west facing connection on the GWML, which goes through T6, onto T5 (linking to the current line), and then onto T4 (linking to the current line again there), before finally carrying onto the Reading/Windsor lines at Bedfont lakes. This options joins up all the potential schemes, and provides lots of connectivity options at a time when you are already digging tunnels, thus keeping costs down.

172. Jim Cobb
     A slight correction (maybe) – should that not have read:
     IF the 3rd runway and T6 are ever built … ??

     Seriously, what are the commentariat’s professional opinions on this, given the level of W London (etc) public opposition the 3rd runway & that, most importantly, Gatwick could get their 2nd runway built whilst we are waiting (so to speak ) ??

173. @Jim Cobb – anything is doable given enough money. As I have pointed out a day or so ago, serving multiple terminals with a fixed track link is (a) expensive and (b) dilutes the traffic flows; adding a sixth terminal will compound the effect. Nor are the traffic flows that great. Even an expanded Heathrow with as good a modal split as Gatwick is unlikely to attract more than 40m public transport users pa. That equates to about 10 000 /hour from all directions. Given that London represents 2/3 at least of all the originators, that leaves just 3-4000/hr from all other origins, including the rest of the UK, so any individual flow is going to be down into low four figures if not three. (I’m not going to bother to repeat these figures yet again in this thread; I would be grateful if people would take time time to read them – and criticise if they wish).

     Same goes for tunnelling costs.

     Not even HAHA ltd think that T4 is necessarily a good idea…

     A west facing link to GWML is what Wrath is about, as discussed above.

     I suspect the some of the existing passengers who use the Hounslow loop might have a thing to say about being sent to Heathrow rather than where they go now, but they will be happy to serve the HAHA juggernaut as it passes by, I dare say.

     @GregT – Your implied question is whether the 3rd runway will ever be built – my guess – and it’s only a guess – is that it will be built in the face of determined and fierce opposition but will take very much longer than is now stated because it will drag through the courts and parliament, regardless of what goes on at Gatwick. The two will “progress” to a life of their own. And it will be ready just in time for it to be redundant (either for technological, logistical, or economic reasons) just like the demolition of the Anglican cathedral in “Black Mischief”. There, I have put my cynicism tablets away now.

174. @GH
     “I suspect the some of the existing passengers who use the Hounslow loop might have a thing to say about being sent to Heathrow rather than where they go now,”

     The Hounslow Loop service currently consists of 2tph which return to Waterloo via Richmond, and 2tph which continue via Chertsey to Weybridge. The latter is essentially several local services strung together – there are quicker ways from Waterloo to Staines and Weybridge, and even Chertsey if you don’t mind changing.
     I doubt there are many people who travel from the Hounslow leg to the Richmond leg of the “rounders” (e.g Isleworth to Twickenham) – allowing for the 2tph frequency, it is usually quicker to go by bus – so sending both legs to Heathrow instead (i.e 2tph via Richmond and 2tph via Hounslow) would inconvenience very few. Alternatively, send all 4tph via Hounslow to Heathrow, and let the Weybridge services go via Richmond.

     But this is unlikely to attract much extra custom. Hounslow already has a frequent service to Heathrow via the Piccadilly Line.

     If reversal at Twickenham (or extension of the connection beyond Feltham to meet the Shepperton line at Fulwell) were allowed, a direct service via Wimbledon could be provided, with connections there to SWML, Thameslink and Tramlink). This would use the paths through Wimbledon currently used by Kingston Loop and Shepperton services – trains to the Shepperton branch being diverted through Richmond, using the paths currently used by the Kingston Loop services.
     That there is demand for a service on this corridor is evidenced by the loadings on the X26, which has held out as long as possible with ever-bigger single deckers (in deference to the number of airport passengers with luggage), but is about to be converted to double deck operation.

175. @timbeau And how frequent is the X26? Ah, 2 bph = 150 PAX/hr. Not much is it? My point. We are dealing with penny numbers here from all points of the compass, even within suburban London. BTW’ Wimbledon is not really the gateway to SWML, is it, if you live anywhere west of Woking? And as for TLK, well, it’s that looping sound again.

176. @GH
     It would be possible for SWML fast line services to call at Wimbledon again, if there was a good reason for it (as indeed they do for two weeks every July…..).

     The X26 does not serve Wimbledon. If it could it would be busier.
     And yes 150pax/hr is not huge by rail standards, (although one should really include some of the 285’s loadings as well for a clearer picture) but a rail link would probably see more use as people perceive it as faster and more reliable. I always use a minicab to get to Heathrow, and only use the x26 to get home again..

     Anyway, my point was more that a Waterloo – Hounslow – Heathrow service is unlikely to attract sufficient new custom (as many of its potential passengers are already using the Piccadilly Line). To be genuinely useful it would need to penetrate much deeper into SW London (or, of course, go the other way, into west Surrey and Hants).

177. @timbeau – I agree with your final para (subject to the usual caution about absolute numbers in any one corridor being small). Your point about the 285 underlines the importance of local movement to the airport (airport workers especially) and the role of buses in such a diffuse market. Perhaps the main headache for bus operators is the difficulty of road access from the south, as users of the Woking rail -air link know to their cost (in fact the 436, long gone, used to be better because it didn’t struggle to go to T4). Maybe more could be done to utilise the cargo tunnel,though I doubt it.

178. Graham H. Your memory of the bus station at Reading is somewhat geographically misplaced. It was in a dark and gloomy concrete hole underneath a bingo hall on the far side of Station Hill from the railway. All now demolished thank goodness ! It would never have been in the way of any practical through-line crayonism.

     The Three Guineas pub is closed for internal refurb. Perhaps secret tunnels are being constructed beneath it.

179. @Fandroid – excuse me, but whilst the Thames Valley services went to the gloomy hole you mention, the Corporation bus services (+ some selected others*) called at the forecourt in question – I used to catch the bus from there out to Sir Alexander Gibb’s office on the former Sutton Seeds site. [I can’t recall off hand where the trolleybus services called in relation to the forecourt, but will look at the wiring diagram after tea).

     +these were assorted independent operators (no doubt unwilling to pay TV’s charges) ; these called at a point nearer to the Mill Lane Bridge rather than directly outside the 3 gn, with shelters against the railway wall, whereas the corporation services had a series of stands parallel to the road.. I wouldn’t now like to say where these went – possibly some of the villages to the south of Reading.

180. @ Greg T – my view on Heathrow expansion is similar to GH. If it’s built and open in 20 years time I’ll be amazed. I think it will be subject to years and years of legal challenge and that’s before you get to the 21st century version of “Swampy et al” causing maximum mayhem in the area planned for expansion. Not so sure about it being rendered redundant by technology or whatever but perhaps GH has a better view of the future than I do. 😉

     On the more general theme this is from the latest TfL Commissioner’s Report

     Aviation
     On 25 October the Government announced its support for a third runway at Heathrow. Significant investment will be needed to improve road and rail connections to Heathrow, and we will work to ensure the impacts of the airport’s expansion on London’s transport network are properly considered by the Government as it develops a draft National Policy Statement for public consultation.

181. I suspect the likelihood of runway 3 and T6 being built depends on three things:
     – whether the government is worried about the loss of Parliamentary seats in any general election before the point of no return is reached
     – whether there is enough of a general feeling of a government not interested in listening to encourage direct action along the lines of Swampy et al.
     – whether the money can be found for all the surface access enhancements needed

     I would previously have expected that no government would have wanted to risk the loss of so many seats (there are 5 marginal seats in west London) to opportunistic opposition decisions not to allow the third runway. After all, that’s how the Conservatives gained 3 seats in 2010. Coupled with the fact that it will not be possible to get to the point of no return before the next general election – and wouldn’t have been even if the go-ahead was given in June 2015 – I was cautiously confident that the scheme would not fly. However, the collapse of the Labour Party combined with the boundary revisions (which will give the Conservatives an extra 20+ seats) may mean that the Government is fairly optimistic that it will get re-elected in 2020 even with the loss of marginal seats in West London. It will be possible, therefore, to get beyond the point of no return before 2025.

     Heathrow alone will not be enough to generate sufficient direct action to worry the Government but if there is a general feeling that the Government is ignoring public voices and bulldozing (pun intended) matters through then Heathrow could become a touchstone for direct action.

     Nobody has yet explained how the money is to be raised. The Government has committed to no increase in landing charges for airlines so HAL has got to find the capital for the new runway/terminal plus the £1bn it has offered for surface access from other sources. The remainder of the cost of surface access – varying between £5bn and £18bn, depending on who you listen to, will have to be found from some other source – I strongly expect the taxpayer. If so the chances of capital for Crossrail 2 will diminish – and I see that the next consultation on this has now been delayed considerably.

     As for the rest, I agree with GH and WW. It’s unlikely to get going much before 2030 and the main winners will be the lawyers.

182. @GH – Operators from the forecourt included my favourite from my time in Reading, ‘Chiltern Queens’ who ran a number of rural routes to the north and west of Reading using a varied fleet of interesting older vehicles like this one : https://www.flickr.com/photos/trolleyfan/6942164428/.

     I’d better stop reminiscing now before the shears come out!

183. @MT – Ah yes! Thanks. (Incidentally also shows that Reading bus station…)

184. Just to be clear, I am not even sure that WRAtH will get built, let alone any access from the south-west. Road access to Heathrow is far too simple and far more cost effective than rail, and there are many other rail projects that are much more useful than new links to Heathrow.

185. Very much agree with that, although WRAtH seems to survive in NR’s forward planning but may be for CP7 (and assuming it gets a slug of pelf from Heathrow’s owners.)

186. SHLR: the line south of Gisborne is mothballed, but Gisborne City Vintage Railway trains still run across the runway – see http://www.gcvr.org.nz/.

187. @timbeau: Building viaducts over runways* is not generally seen as a good idea

     A point that might seem obvious but is evidently lost on the Economist, who this week declaimed “the fact that [Heathrow] has not yet even decided whether to build its runway over or under the M25”.

     (What they meant was “has not yet decided whether to build its runway over the M25 or tunnel the M25 under the runway)”

188. GH: interesting that you mention the cargo tunnel, because I’m pretty sure that at one stage LT ran buses through it (though I can’t find any evidence of this on my 60s bus maps that haven’t gone AWOL). Fat chance of that happening now!

     And adjacent to Reading General forecourt was an excellent transport book shop, in the parade of shops on the north side of the road heading east as you left the station. But I digress even more…

189. @Graham H, Mike: Maybe more could be done to utilise the cargo tunnel,though I doubt it

     See here for a 1970s map with the tunnel in use.

     Heathrow’s public plans include an extension of the existing road tunnel south of the Central Terminal Area as far as the Southern Perimeter Road, that presumably could be used by bus services from the south.

     They also indicate that Terminal 6 would be next to Terminal 5 and presumably share the same railway station. Curiously, the rail link to Terminal 4 is not shown.

190. Bus services through the cargo tunnel started in about 1970, but its heyday was from the opening of Terminal 4 in 1986, when several other routes used it, in order to serve all four terminals. They were all withdrawn in 1989 as a security measure, as the tunnel is airside. Transfers now have to be done via the Perimeter Roads or, more recently, the Heathrow Express.

191. quinlet
     Nobody has yet explained how the money is to be raised.
     Precisely. Someone, I think ngh, pointed out that Gatwick can go ahead & build their second R-way without guvmint money.
     Which makes the whole thing very moot.
     Meanwhile said guvmint can say to the very powerful vested interests – “Well we gave HAL the go-ahead, but events, dear boy – not our problem”
     Can’t they?

     There, do you think that sufficiently cynical?

     Oh & the ONLY winners will be the lawyers, I’m afraid.

192. Ian J etc.
     Another option for the M25,from which they seem to have retreated in horror,was diverting the motorway to the West “around the end” of the new runway.
     The exact cause of the horror wasn’t gone into…the cost? The chaos caused by diverting a “live” motorway? Some other reason?

193. Graham H is, as ever, lucid and persuasive on potential passenger numbers. One point often overlooked, though, is that Heathrow’s claim and aim is to be a “hub airport”, that is it plans for a lot of passengers to change planes there without leaving – more than 30% of its users. Gatwick is a point to point airport, meaning very few passengers change there. The result is that, in 2016 without extra runways at least, the number of people passing through the front doors his rather closer than you might think: around 51 million for Heathrow; 42 million for Gatwick

194. DH- servus. The point about LHR as a hub lies behind my answer to Greg Tingey about the future of the 3rd runway. Not every airline is sold on the hub and spoke model as the manufacturers of ever-larger jumbos are discovering; a number prefer the smaller, direct flight model. I’m not qualified to say who is right and which model,if either, will prevail, but the problem with smaller aircraft would seem to be that their consumption of airport resources (landing slots,stand time etc) is little different to much larger craft. Indeed, in some respects, such as avoiding that wellknown surge effect at passport control whenever a Jumbo arrives, smaller aircraft may be beneficial in management terms. I can see that a direct flight model might well require a different approach to airport management in such things as terminal layout, facilities configuration and so on. It would also – and perhaps most importantly – affect the volumes passing through the front door as opposed to passing through the duty free. That is what underlay my comment about obsolesence.

195. However much transit passengers may contribute to the economy – and as they never leave the duty-free area the answer is probably “not a lot” – I really would rather they didn’t fly over our heads – twice – on their way from New Delhi to New York, Manchester to Mombasa, or wherever.

196. @timbeau – yes, I have never bought the argument that an ever-expanding number of transit passengers is in any way good for the economy; nor do I buy the argument that we need to expand the range of direct flights to support business growth: either,with a hub and spoke operation,the argument falls because you will have to change anyway, or – and I write from personal experience – if you’ve got to go to a place on business, you’ve got to go, however difficult or inconvenient the journey. What sort of business wimp says “I’m not going to bother to do business in Tazbekistan just because I can’t fly there direct”? [The only time I have refused to travel because of inconvenient air flights was to go to Namibia to address a conference on transport strategy, and that was because the lack of daily connecting flights meant that it would have taken a whole week to do the round trip -but that was a function of timetables and poor connexions. If those had worked, I would have gone, changing in Joburg or whatever].

197. Looking at the plan of the LHR development, asides the missing T4 rail-link already pointed out, I am surprised by how poor the apparent diversion of the A4 looks. This is quite a busy road and not only for airport access – but it would seem that any East-West traffic on that would need to take on a rather messy diversion to the north in order to meet to diverted A3044 across the north of the extended airport site

198. @Stuart
     The 1943 War Cabinet plans for a 9 runway Heathrow (then to be 3 runways E-W north of the former Heath Row hamlet, 3 on a NW-SE direction, and 3 NE-SW), made provision for a diverted A4. That road alignment was defined just north of the intended eventual airport boundary. It was used by… the M4.

199. Ian J: According to these plans from Heathrow (in May 2014, large pdf) the plan (assuming the 3rd runway is built) is to drop the rail link to T4, leaving just the tube, until T4 is eventually closed.

     http://www.heathrow.com/file_source/Company/Static/PDF/Companynewsandinformation/TBF_techspec_vol1.pdf

     This is mentioned on p213

200. @timbeau
     I can remember taking the Green Line 727 through the cargo tunnel in my misspent plane spotting youth to get from Heathrow to Gatwick using my £1.40 Golden Rover ticket in the late 70s.

201. @ Graham H
     The argument about direct flights being needed to encourage business has regularly been exploded by the airlines themselves. Just last month British Airways abandoned flights to one of its three destinations in China (Chengdu) because of a lack of demand and previously they abandoned flights to four destinations in central Asia for the same reason. They would much rather fly full planes to New York or other popular destinations than to places nobody wants to fly to. It’s also absurd to claim that there would be people who would happily travel from elsewhere in Europe to China via London – talk about going to Birmingham by way of Beachy Head. Where London does score on transfer traffic is to North America, and that explains why there are more flights to more destinations in North America than from anywhere else in Europe. Oh, and the fact that London is Western Europe’s biggest city and the world’s financial centre might have something to do with it too.

202. I actually think that the assumption that BAA will have to give up Heathrow Express once their exclusive contract on the mainline runs out may be mistaken.

     They are certainly not acting like they can’t carry on. I have just been reading their updated Heathrow plan.

     There are several interesting things there. The plan is to transform the airport into a two terminal airport and eventually abandon T4 for a bigger cargo area. So by the 2030’s no more trains to T4.

     With two main terminals, it will be much easier to serve by public transport.

     There will be major changes to the road system, with a new tunnel to the Southern Perimeter road from the Central Terminal Area. Along with a beefed up grade separation of the M25 Junction 14 and some of the Southern Permimter road junctions this will form a new main access to the Airport from the South and the M25 reducing traffic on the M4, This will also transform Bus and cycle access from the South.

     They also want to develop an Airport city immediately West of the T5/T6 complex replacing the BA headquarters and all those offices and hotels lost on the western A4. These will be all linked by an automated people mover system to the Terminals and the train station, thereby reducing car use and the need for shuttle buses.

     For rail it sees reversing towards Airport junction and west of T5 so trains do not occupy platform space.

     It sees there being Crossrail to T5, Heathrow express continuing at least 2 trains an hour to Reading , while network rail likes the Idea of an half hourly east west service from Milton Keynes to Oxford and Reading. Their report says that they “Obviously prefer a premium product to Reading of 4 trains an hour operated by Heathrow Express”

     For Southern access the see 4 trains an hour to Waterloo via Staines and maybe an extra 2 trains an hour to Woking once grade separation is done their.

203. @rp

     Some good things there, but I’m not convinced the way forward for western access is as a ‘premium product’ terminating at Reading. I think it could have far more potential as a local service, part of the ‘rump Thames Valley local group’ once the Elizabeth Line has taken over the primary London flow. This could be thought of as a ‘Thames Valley Metro’ combining all the stopping services west of Reading (to Basingstoke, Newbury and Oxford) with the western access services to Heathrow and opening up a host of through journey opportunities across Reading, as well as providing direct Heathrow Journeys from a wide range of Thames Valley stations, useful for journeys to work at the airport. At Heathrow, as suggested, the trains would run through calling at T1,2,3 as well as T5/6, but clearly there’s insufficient capacity to carry on to London, so an east side turnback facility is needed somewhere, probably best as a pair of dedicated bays at Hayes. that would also provide additional connectional frequency to the airport from Elizabeth line trains that don’t go there. All these services would be 4 car emu, with options to stretch to 8 in the peak, they would thus provide additional frequency between the terminals. I’ve nothing against HEX extending some of their trains as an open access express services elsewhere in the west IN ADDITION to the local service described above, but I doubt there’s any particular flow that provides sufficient demand for this, so the primary western access for Long distance airport connections from Reading (GWML) and Basingstoke (SWML) would always be via the high frequency Thames Valley Metro services as described.

204. The people mover system described could be extended out to Staines to provide Southern Rail links as well as connectivity to the town centre (with it’s local bus hub as well). It is only just over 4 km from T5/6 and a free high frequency airport shuttle station could be fully signed and branded as part of the airport thus becoming a peripheral airport access node. In addition to its airport link role the shuttle could even attract some interchange traffic between SWT Staines services and the Piccadilly Line. Much of the desired connectivity gained without additional heavy rail services or performance pollution.

205. There are a number of commercial problems,on which Heathrow’s owners are understandably silent just now, concerning the rail services across the airport. Partly because rail income is an unregulated contribution to the common purse, Heathrow is incentivised to maximise fares charged to passengers using (or transiting) the airport; the likely methods of financing any new links will push it inthe same direction. Heathrow can also, for the same reason, be expected to charge “outrageous” access charges – as they have already attempted for Elizabeth Line services.

     These issues will affect their willingness to contribute to WRatH and the like and may well affect the business case for any of them. In particular, these financial problems – of their ownmaking, be it said, will, as with the HEX/XR saga, impact on any attempt to integrate airport services with the rest of the world.

206. Mark Townend 3 November 2016 at 10:16

     “Some good things there, but I’m not convinced the way forward for western access is as a ‘premium product’ terminating at Reading. I think it could have far more potential as a local service ”

     Isn’t the simple thing to extend those Crossrail services through Heathrow to all stations to Reading?
     Those Crossrail trains that bypass Heathrow on the mainline could all terminate at Maidenhead (or Slough).
     Is my Meerkat toy in the post?

207. Re Alan G,

     Agreed, that would be very useful for many airport employees living to the West which they (Heathrow) will have to address with traffic and pollution issues in the future.

     Re Graham H,

     With responsibility for Western Access moving to NR circa 2 years ago and the next GW franchise potentially outbidding Heathrow for the paths (9/10car IEP or 12 car 387 have more seats and stations to fill them from) I suspect Heathrow are hedging their bets, the drivers already seemingly exiting to other TOCs when they can.

208. @Alan G – going via the airport adds almost precisely 15 minutes to the journey time from,say, Reading – why disadvantage those passengers (especially if they are forced to pay more for the privilege)? You would, however, in the interests of connectivity from places like S Wales or Bristol, want to extend the Heathrow trains to somewhere they could connect with IC services, as you note. So you’d probably give Reading a half hourly service via the airport and halfhourly down the main line. The traffic might even have built up to justify that by the time WRaTH actually opens…

     @ngh – it’s difficult,isn’t it, to see what HEX’s USP is going to be once the Elizabeth Line opens.

209. @Graham H: It would give Lord Dawlish a pleb free ride into town?

210. @SHLR – Nah, he’d use his private saloon anyway.

211. Into the 1970s Le Touquet airport had passenger trains that crossed both the runway and the apron and seemingly dropped you right next to your plane.
     http://railwayherald.com/imagingcentre/view/138538/WV

212. @Lazarus, but then you could fly (!) your car to Le Touquet for only 6gn in the ’50s.

213. @Alan Griffiths
     “Isn’t the simple thing to extend those Crossrail services through Heathrow to all stations to Reading?”

     via Staines, perhaps?

214. @GH
     But 6 gn was about £200 in today’s money. Eurotunnel will take you for a lot less than that.

     In “Paddington* Abroad”, written in 1961, the Brown family fly to France with their car.

     Surprised to read that the last cross-channel air ferry flew as recently as 1977
     http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/british-world-airlines-ltd-history/

     *On topic?

215. “Eurotunnel will take you for a lot less than that.” I should jolly well hope so… Amazing airline economics.

216. @GH
     Fuel was cheap in the 1950s. Facilities were fairly basic, so staff and infrastructure costs would be minimal. (Imagine the security checks you would need to take your car on a plane now!) And many of the aircraft were RAF-surplus so basically a glut on the market.

     And if you turn up at Cheriton unbooked it will cost £214
     https://www.eurotunnel.com/uk/tickets/

217. Thank you for the air link. 70 000 vehicles/pa is in itself a very surprising figure – an average of 200 per day,with implied peaks of 3-400/day.

218. A through service heathrow on the GWML will probably be advertised as two separate services that start and end at Heahtrow.

219. @rational plan – how do you know that? (Given the time penalty for the airport side trip, it’s always going to be quicker to travel down the main line direct, of course, between any two stations other than the airport ones).

220. @Graham H:
     “it’s difficult,isn’t it, to see what HEX’s USP is going to be once the Elizabeth Line opens.”

     Well I guess HEX will over a less congested, non-stop service from West London that XR won’t. I travel a lot to Oslo, and there you have the Flytoget express airport train from the City Centre and several urban centres the far side of Oslo sharing the line and charging a premium to regional NSB express trains

     Business travellers who would in any case need to use the tube to get to XR are still likely to plump for HEX at a premium, but I am sure numbers will be down. Heathrow Connect has been so poorly used, XR has to take more passengers …

221. I mean that there will still be direct services along the mainline to Paddington. There will be Crossrail services to Heathrow. They want Reading to Heathrow services.

     Now, they could operate two separate services or they could operate one service and not advertise it as a through service.

     There are already plenty of slow services that are advertised as ending at Ealing Broadway, when in fact they go to Paddington. They only start saying Paddington once they get to stations when they are no longer massively slower than the fast ones.

222. @rational plan

     Is this conjecture, or are you citing an actual plan?

223. @AG, NGH

     Local trains from Hayes via Heathrow to Basingstoke, Newbury and Oxford would serve local customers to Reading just as well as Crossrail extended through Heathrow would while also minimising the number of terminating trains at Reading from the East, which under the ‘all Crossrail’ scenario might add up to 8 trains an hour, tying up an entire pair of the through platforms on the relief side. The NR route study recommends joining services across both Reading AND Heathrow.

     There’s another matter in play which is the relocation of the HEX depot from Old Oak to Langley. Clearly with western access, that is very well placed to feed trains directly into service at T5/6, rather than via a tortuous empty stock run through through Hayes. There iss also concern over the the HEX trains, which at 8 or 9 cars, were previously considered excessively long for likely demand. Elizabeth Line trains of a similar length must also be too long in that case, unless it is believed that simply by being branded with the magical roundel, the service will drag additional customers kicking and screaming from their houses, even though journey time from London to Slough, Maidenhead or Reading via the airport will be longer than even a future all stations Elizabeth Line service on the main GWML reliefs throughout.

     The Thames Valley Metro (TVM) option provides an attractive frequency from Reading (at least the 4tph originally conceived) with more suitably sized trains that work across Reading from a range of settlements to the west of Reading, including Basingstoke for LSWR connections. The overlap of TVM and HEX services through the airport tunnels would provides greater capacity and frequency for terminal transfers and connections at Hayes from the Elizabeth Line trains that avoid the airport.

     A rebuild and widening of Hayes station, could move the reliefs one track to the north and the mains one track to the south. The middle two tracks (platforms #2,#3 today) would then become a terminal for Airport trains from the west. Access to and from the airport branch could be free from conflict with through main and relief line traffic thanks to the new flyover arrangements under construction.

224. The loop via Heathrow to WRatH is very similar to the loop via Frankfurt airport for S-Bahn trains in that it is a longer and slower route than the original main line. When originally opened, some of the S-Bhan trains went via the airport while others took the faster, direct route. Nowadays all the train go via the airport because of the demand.

225. I recall that there were some suggestions that the East West Rail services from Milton Keynes could be extended beyond Oxford to Reading and Heathrow.

226. @Verulamius – one of the things that railway operators will tell that, by bitter experience, the more you link end-on services the more you are asking for operational pollution. East -West is going to have a number of difficult interfaces as it is, adding Reading and Heathrow will increase their number without adding much by way of connectivity.

227. @Graham H: Heathrow can also, for the same reason, be expected to charge “outrageous” access charges – as they have already attempted for Elizabeth Line services.

     Indeed. A lot depends on whether the ORR decision on the access charges for the Heathrow Spur is upheld. Note that ORR decided in that case that:

     the spur was not conceived as a standalone project but as part of a wider plan to create more capacity at the airport. As a standalone it was considered to be an unattractive proposition.

     Which means, if this is upheld in the courts, that Heathrow cannot, under EU law* charge more than marginal costs (because it doesn’t meet the test that “the project could not otherwise have been undertaken without the prospect of such higher charges”: Heathrow never intended for it to be a money-making operation in its own right).

     Similarly with a western or southern link: if the purpose of Heathrow building these links is to enable a third runway, rather than as a financially viable project in their own right, then Heathrow can’t charge more than marginal costs for using them. But if it is financially viable independent of the third runway, they can – but this might require extortionate** access charges which would put off other operators.

     Which points towards Heathrow operating the services themselves and paying themselves the extortionate fees. But then they would need to seek some kind of guaranteed access rights onto Network Rail routes along the lines of the 25? year deal they made with British Rail for Heathrow Express. But is such a thing even allowed any more?

     If Network Rail rather than Heathrow pay for the links then the issue doesn’t arise. The Heathrow Spur and stations will become an open access railway in c 2018 so any operator can pay buy access subject to capacity.

     Meanwhile Heathrow Express loses money and can’t make a profit once Crossrail opens, according to Heathrow:

     ORR says it has been informed by HAL that, on average, HEX revenues over the last 10 years equated to 80% of the full operating and historical and long-term costs, but the projected 100% recovery would not be reached in 2018 due to the Crossrail start up.

     On the other hand Heathrow don’t mind losing money on Heathrow Express because it is all paid for by the airlines under the Regulatory Asset Base.

     Some interesting negotiations between the government and Heathrow ahead.

     * Brexit caveat applies

     ** TfL noted in their response to the ORR consultation that Heathrow’s proposed charges were an order of magnitude greater than those of any other rail operator in Europe.

228. @IanJ – a very helpful analysis. And whilst the setup may look like wooden dollars permabulating between HAHA and HEX, I suspect the “losses” are doing important work on the taxation and common purse fronts as well as the RAB.

229. Ian J
     Rational commenting in this area is … difficult.
     “Heathrow” seem determined to gouge extract as much cash as possible from potential punters/passengers locked in to their transport schemes – & this also appears to apply to the 3rd Runway epic saga, as well, I’m afraid.
     Even allowing for my dislike of “flying”, I find Heathrow an appalling place & avoid going there, if I can – & I know someone, living in Edinburgh, who deliberately goes through CDG in Paris or even Schipol, rather than approach Heathrow, when he goes to the States or elsewhere long-haul.

     Lazy question, perhaps.
     Wiki says Heathrow handled approx 75 million pax in 2015, some of whom, of course will be in transit – airside only.
     Meanwhile Waterloo (for 2014) handled approx 100 million & rising.
     So – why does Heathrow appear to get “special treatment”?

230. Re Graham H and Ian J,

     TfL noted in their response to the ORR consultation that Heathrow’s proposed charges were an order of magnitude greater than those of any other rail operator in Europe*.

     * the highest of which are an order of magnitude more than NR typically charges so 2 orders higher than NR…

     Taxation agreed, but not sure how long it is going to last as HEx is doing an aggressive cost cutting drive so “losses” may not be so large especially in years after 2017 when some of the original fixed term contracts and leases start to expire expire.

     WRAtH was a Heathrow led project, the current (as of the last 2 years) project WRLtH is an NR led one (at Dft’s instigation) so it will presumably be nigh on impossible for Heathrow to pull similar tricks to previously, DfT has got wise.

     If I remember correctly I think Heathrow were pondering swapping the rail assets out of RAB when the debt was paid off and swapping in some more useful new high debt assets (enlarging Terminal 2, R3, T6…) instead given the CAA heeling digging on RAB increase.

231. It’s really quite shocking, isn’t it, that the planning for rail schemes at Heathrow is so heavily influenced by the arcane modalities of airport regulation,finance, and taxation?

232. Re Graham H,

     Not as shocking as it was for Heathrow to discover that rail activities involved DfT’s rail section and the ORR not CAA who have rail not aviation focused priorities and didn’t give a about Heathrow’s RAB or the CAA’s aim to hold down costs in the current regulatory period to enhance their regulatory credentials!

233. @ngh – 🙂 You’d think they’d have learned something from HEX, although my admittedly limited acquaintance with successive HEX managers suggests that they were entirely focussed on project delivery rater than the financial or regulatory context.

234. @ LBM 1748 3/11 – the info RP is referring to is in the Heathrow document linked to earlier. The precise service pattern for Padd- Hrow – Reading is supposition on his part but HAL are clear they aspire to run a service in that form.

     I only gave the transport bits a skim read but I got a sense that HAL were far more interested in trying to secure a broader basis for HEX’s survival and also creating money raking mechanisms by funding extra infrastructure as Graham H stated earlier. Apart from that the rest of the transport stuff seemed a bit airy fairy to me – lots of nice words and dangling carrots but I expect they’d be complete b****** to deal with in terms of forking out a penny to fund better bus services or trains. They also seemed very weak on actual measures to constrain car use despite all the good words about constraining it! Loads of nice phrases about reducing employee car use but there’s a strong undercurrent that they still expect a shed load of people to drive to the airport for whatever purpose.

     The document was published in 2014 and has been somewhat overtaken by events such as the HS2 leg to Heathrow being adandoned and the pending disintegration of bus services from Surrey into Heathrow because Abellio can’t make them pay. We’ve also seen First Bus rationalise their links and services into Heathrow from the west so one wonders where Heathrow’s cash is in terms of protecting these services? Presumably it’s non existent.

     The planned demise of terminal 4 is also interesting with HAL saying the rail link will be adandoned (so Crossrail automatically goes to T5?) leaving only LU serving the site. However if the passenger terminal is demolished then the station would vanish too as it sits on HAL land and is leased to LU. Even if T4 is converted for freight handling (as stated) who would pick up the cost of any changes to the station plus the issues around serving it given loadings will fall greatly compared to now? Can’t see LU being keen on keeping the loop running and maintained for what would most likely be a smallish peak time flow for Heathrow employees and not much else.

     Ian J’s remarks about the likely funding and construction of any new rail links being taken out of HAL’s hands to avoid “wallet snatching” activities is also highly relevant. Obviously Heathrow have to set out a proposition as to how an expanded airport would function but I think we have a very, very long way to go before anything sensible in transport terms emerges that can actually be funded and delivered.

235. @WW – and one wonders just how much of any of the specifics in the 2014 document are simply straw men to divert attention from the general lack of content.

236. Just a general point. The new government has announced that it has changed it’s mind and will not be funding London’s new Concert Hall. It looks like there are two possible motives. Death to all projects that had George Osbornes support and/or there is no political support for spending money on London and/ or it’s elites pastimes.

     I can’t see funding for London projects becoming any easier unless they have really high BCR’s and can be seen to unlocking growth.

237. Is Sir Simon Rattle going to remain as the Chief conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra as I understand he was enticed back from Berlin with the proposed new London Symphonic Hall as the main carrot?

238. @Verulamius – maybe not such a problem with plenty of conductor openings with SR

239. @Anonymous 🙂

     @ Verulamius – some sort of prize for the least transport-related comment on any thread on this site? @rational plan – highly commended

240. A loud moderator’s cough – which, being interpreted, means “Please do not proceed any further down this pathway”.

241. Relevant though.
     which is better for both London & the Nation & has a higher BCR:
     Crossrail2 or Heathrow’s expansion?

     I think we all know the answer to that one, but will the previously-mentioned “vested interests” allow it?

242. @MT on 1/11 – I’ve now had an opportunity to check the wiring diagrams for Reading trolleybuses and the Stations were served by a spur off the Caversham Road into a trolleybus station in the forecourt, alongside the wall where your Chiltern Queens bus is shewn, which reached about as far as the 3gn, and with the vehicles then turning back to Caversham Road just short of the actual GW building.

243. @Greg T:

     Meanwhile Waterloo (for 2014) handled approx 100 million & rising.
     So – why does Heathrow appear to get “special treatment”?

     I realise your question was rhetorical, but there is already significant money being spent on relieving Waterloo and the prospect of more to come in the form of Crossrail 2.

     which is better for both London & the Nation & has a higher BCR:
     Crossrail2 or Heathrow’s expansion?

     That may depend on your definition of the Nation… I suspect Nicola Sturgeon and Arlene Foster would go for Heathrow expansion every time.

244. Ian J
     Except that it took almost as long to get the disused platforms @ WAT back into use, as making up [SNIP] minds as to airport expansion ( Maybe slight exaggeration there, but … )
     Who Arlene Foster? Unfortunately I do know about Ms Sturgeon.
     And you carefully ignored the “BCR” bit, I notice. *cough*

245. Arelene Foster is the first Minister of Northern Ireland.

     However, any expectation that either of these ladies have that the construction of a third runway will lead to a big increase in flights to Heathrow from either Northern Ireland or Scotland is likely, I suspect, to be dashed. The Davies report actually said that the construction of the third runway would lead to fewer domestic destinations being served from Heathrow rather than more. This is because he expected the big deamand was for international flights. Even though the Government has said it wants more domestic flights, it’s quite tricky to see how it can insist on it.

246. Re Quinlet and Greg T,

     And Arlene especially as United have pulled the plug on the last Belfast transatlantic (once a day) route was week when the proposed £3m a year subsidy deal collapses due to state aid rules. A proportion of the NI population seem morally opposed to driving 105miles down the A1/M1 to an airport* with increasing transatlantic flights at any cost…

     *Said airport also has 2nd runway plans costing just €320m and possibly completed by the end of 2020 before Heathrow gets a spade in the ground.

     Enjoy:
     http://www.irishexaminer.com/business/heathrow-airport-plan-offers-open-goal-for-ireland-428798.html

247. @Graham H, 6 November 2016 at 11:45

     That all makes sense. I always felt the corporation buses didn’t really like serving the station at all. It was always an extra fare stage to get the last 300 yards or so from Broad Street to the station, and in the comprehensive rerouting following construction of the Oracle shopping centre the council engineered a one way clockwise loop around the town that routed a number of buses a long way away from the railway station, in particular the east to west leg of the high frequency cross town route 17.

     The latest road changes in conjunction with the station redevelopment have removed the road carriageway directly in front of the station, so any buses approaching from Caversham Rd must reverse before reaching the station building just as in the trolley era. There are very few routes that do this today however, according to this map :
     http://www.reading-buses.co.uk/files/maps/31%20august%2015/Reading%20town%20centre%20stops.pdf

     Note the one way loop is still in service too. When the station changes were being planned I remember there were plans to reroute the east – west 17 route nearer the station and along Friar Street, which was to be converted to a two way street again after having been one way since instigation of the loop. Friar Street is two way again for buses but it appears the 17 still runs via the Minster Street / Gun Street loop. The problem is there’s currently no way from Kings Road towards the station without going round the west side of the town and routes formerly used have largely been converted to pedestrian areas.

248. Thanks for the map link. Will come in handing for a football match on 11 February 2017.

249. quinlet
     the Government has said it wants more domestic flights
     – it has?
     Why?
     Surely, that way madness lies, along with the ghosts of Marples & Beeching?

250. @Greg
     It was a bribe to get the Scot Nats (previously ambivalent) to support the third runway at Heathrow. The political sellability of a scheme which would (a) be very unpopular locally because of increased noise and interference, and (b) result in worsening links to every other part of the nation, would have been very limited. The promise only needs to be sustained until Parliament has had its vote, towards the end of next year, after which commercial rules will then apply. The Government of the day, when the chickens come home to roost in about 2030 or so, is unlikely to be the same as today’s and can therefore deny any responsibility for what they would describe as a wholly unrealistic promise at the time.

251. @Greg T: And you carefully ignored the “BCR” bit, I notice

     I didn’t, but I was musing on what Nicola Sturgeon and Arlene Foster might think, and experience suggests they may not be very economically purist when it comes to other governments spending money that might benefit their countries (not an attack on them in particular – for example no Mayor of London with any sense would turn down a central government offer to fully pay for a particular scheme, just because it had a lower BCR than some other scheme they had in mind).

     @quinlet: Even though the Government has said it wants more domestic flights, it’s quite tricky to see how it can insist on it

     It could enshrine a quota for domestic flights in legislation – the Scots and Northern Irish would be foolish if they voted for a third runway without making the government’s promise legally binding.

252. Ian J
     for example no Mayor of London with any sense would turn down a central government offer to fully pay for a particular scheme
     There is, of course the reverse possibility.
     There are still whispers, that when a certain hater of London’s government abolished the then GLC & the running of the Underground had to be farmed out ….
     The Corporation offered to buy it, lock, stock & barrel for £1 – & were refused.

     I suspect this may be an urban legend – would Lord Dawlish know, do you think? Or would he be bound by confidentiality rules?

253. @IanJ – I would(not) like to be the draftsman who had to devise legislation to do what you say. What is a domestic flight?Between what places should they operate? And at what times ? And fares? And how do you impose an obligation to provide an air service on an airport? What if no airline wants to run? And how do you avoid it becoming a PSO? [Not that you can’t have an air PSO -the Irish have one to Rathlin Island but that tends to reinforce my question]. Sorry to ask what , no doubt these days, would be called elitist questions.

254. Graham: I don’t quite see the problem. The obligation (on, say, the operators of Heathrow) could simply be to restrict a given proportion (or a given number) of landing/take-off slots to flights whose other terminus is in the UK. If no-one wanted to operate such flights (or pay Heathrow’s price for them), then the slots would stay vacant, but the promise would have been fulfilled. And most probably the operators would price them such that they got filled – with something – as an empty slot earns nothing.

     Whether the flights thus organised would actually do any good is another matter – I suspect that they would just be filled with flights to/from Glasgow which would otherwise use Southampton or somewhere as their English terminal.

255. @Graham H: you could model it on the scheme enshrined in Australian law by which a certain proportion of take off and landing slots at Sydney airport are reserved for flights to regional New South Wales (which would otherwise have been displaced by more profitable international flights buying out their slots).

     So you build on the existing system where slots are traded on the open market, but add a second (necessarily cheaper) category of domestic-only slots. The market decides what use to make of them (and you would have a use-it-or-lose-it provision for slots).

256. @Malcolm: presumably if you travelled regularly from Scotland to, say, Westminster, the idea of landing at Heathrow rather than Southampton would be rather more appealing…

257. @IanJ – I see, although the fact that you were requiring the airport operator to take a financial hit could be construed as an Obligation under EU legislation – not applicable in NSW, of course – and – hey – soon not to be applicable here either. (It will be “amusing” to see how this works out for the rail industry, where the subsidy framework has really only been developed since 1972).

258. Graham: As you say, EU law will probably soon be an irrelevance. But airport operators already have to work within a legal framework, if they were entirely unrestricted they could obviously make more money. If your concern is about “singling out” Heathrow and giving it an extra obligation over and above those applicable to other airports, that’s easily bypassed, surely, just make the law applicable to every airport with more than 400,000 aircraft movements per year!

259. @Malcolm – no, not so fast. If you generalised it, then the Obligation would apply to everybody, and they could all claim compensation. In lay terms, the Obligation arises whenever anyone is required to do something which isn’t in their commercial interest. Simples! BTW, I would place a large bet that in the wreck of EU -inspired legislation, the PSO rules will be one of the survivors.

260. Graham: So if parliament, or a minister, imposes further restrictions on night flying, for example, airports could claim compensation? If the speed limit on a particular road is reduced to 50 mph, a coach firm preferring its coaches to travel at 62 mph can claim?

261. No; to be more explicit, the regulation is really about contract law. There are many things that people have to do which are against their commercial interest but which form part of the common law – not killing your competitors, for example, or more plausibly, pollution controls. The Obligation arises when you impose or agree a deal. And it’s of the essence of a deal (something that seems not to be understood by the wider political community just now) that it takes two to tango.

262. We do have air PSO routes to London. The Dundee to Stansted route is one.
     Of course, we could go on for weeks pontificating about why Dundee needs a PSO route when there is an airport just down the road with masses of flights to five of the six London airports (including LHR)

263. @Graham H

     “an air PSO -the Irish have one to Rathlin Island”
     I doubt that the government of the Irish Republic would be particularly interested in ensuring the existence of flights to an island with a population of 75 which is part of Northern Ireland, and has no airstrip.

     Are you sure you don’t mean Inishmore? (which has a population eleven times bigger than Rathlin’s)

264. Probably!

     @IslandDweller – who pays the subsidy and specifies the service in that case? The Scottish government presumably?

265. Dundee and PSO? Seems to be UK (rather than devolved govt). Original press release came from Danny Alexander at the Treasury (previous coalition govt).
     It’s really a bonkers idea from top to bottom – runway restrictions at Dundee mean that only relatively small planes can operate the route.

266. On the discussion of reserving slots for domestic flights. The “ownership” of runway slots at is mostly grandfather rights rather than something governed by title – use the slots or lose them. There is a semi official market in slots – airlines keen to expand (Emirates….) pay phenomenal sums for slots at Heathrow.
     In terms of restrictions, the takeover of BMI by IAG (IAG own BA) included a requirement that certain BMI slots were given up by BA to any airline who wanted them – but only if they used them to operate certain routes (including Manchester and Edinburgh). Virgin grabbed those slots, but has given them up as they could not make a success of them. As no other airline wanted those routes, these slots have now reverted to BA – who are using them to launch flights to Brindisi, Zakynthos, Murcia, Pula and Tallinn. (BA have added one domestic route out of LHR recently – Inverness).
     Of course, this is all about the two existing runways and doesn’t necessarily tell us how slots on runway 3 could be restricted to domestic routes….
     As for what passengers want…. Recent growth in domestic routes has been to City airport – routes such as Edinburgh have more flights to LCY than they do to LHR.

267. @Malcoln
     When the UK leaves the EU we will still have many treaties with the EU which will effectively mean we will have to adhere to many EU laws especially if we want to operate within the European open skys environment. If we don’t I think the EU will quite happily punish the UK’s very successful aviation industry. After all if the UK puts “Britain first” then why wouldn’t the EU put the EU first.

268. Island Dweller could have made a further point. If, say, 10% of the new slots created by runway 3 were dedicated to domestic only flights, these would either be taken up or not. If not then there would be extreme pressure to allow these to revert to general slots. If taken up by established international airlines, such as BA, then the airline would start to impose pressure to say that they would be better off commercially using those slots for international flights and, as Graham H has said, would then start seeking compensation. If taken up by a domestic only airline (are there any?) then that particular problem would not arise. However, in both cases, state aid provisions could come into play which (at least until 2019) could result in legal action against the government.

269. @IslandDweller – your last point is a telling one – the significantly shorter checkin times at City* compared with LHR mean that aviation has a chance for domestic flights. Unless LHR can solve this problem , for many it will be quicker to use the train rather than spend a couple of hours traipsing round T123 followed by an hour in the air and an hour getting out of Manchester Airport or whatever. I really don’t see the domestic air market on any large scale – London- Edinburgh and Dundee/Aberdeen, and a handful of “CrossCountry” routes such as Edinburgh-Cardiff but nothing on a scale which requires more slots at LHR.

     * A contentious issue, but XR to City might well kill the LHR domestic market… Fast access and shorter checkin. Just a thought. [Hint – I don’t think LCY have quite twigged this].

270. LCY also works well for, eg, Antwerp, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Luxembourg Zurich & Milan; the first three are probly nearer than Edinburgh, Glasgow, Cardiff. 15 minutes from ramp (gate) to platform, inbound; ~30 outbound depending on security – which is pretty slick in my experience.

     LHR & LGW can’t get close; don’t get me started on STN or Luton.

271. On the Elizabeth Line, I think it’s a slight faff to get to LCY as you’re on the wrong branch of the DLR at Custom House. I think we discussed it elsewhere.

272. At the risk of repeating myself, at the moment 31% of Heathrow’s passengers are transferring, not leaving through the front door. So a large number of those domestic passengers will probably be transferring to an international flight. Particularly as BA has all but abandoned international services from anywhere but the three London airports (and a few weekend leisure destinations from Stansted, using the otherwise idle City fleet)

273. Dublin isn’t domestic but in terms of passenger numbers, it is the 3rd largest route out of LHR, after JFK and Dubai. I can see there being pressure for more slots to there particularly if the second runway gets built, as has been mentioned. I think IAG have aspirations to do more hubbing out of Dublin given the landing charges are a lot less than LHR.

     Having queued for about 90 minutes to get through US immigration at O’Hare last week, flying via Dublin and clearing immigration there does have some attractions….

274. Don’t worry, there will be far fewer flights to the USA in coming years.
     There might be more inbound traffic, however ….

275. Reynolds 953:

     Just wait until Mancheter gets US immigration* (as strongly rumoured), then an HS2 station there suddenly seems to make a bit of sense. It would be quicker door to door from most of central London to the US via Manchester.

     * assuming that today’s seismic events in Washington don’t lead to a complete revision of US Border controls.

276. Re Reynolds 953,

     And Dublin is the largest destination for London Airports overall – most Dublin passengers aren’t transferring at the UK end. City and /or Gatwick expansion will do well out of Dublin market.
     Dublin as an alternative hub – the fees there will be lower after the second runway than Heathrow was 20years ago… As with SFD’s Manchester +HS2 option a good chance it could be quick and cheaper overall given the time and cost of using Heathrow for the US. Dublin also bypasses most of the environmental taxation in the UK.

277. @GrahamH. Will passengers stop choosing LCY because Crossrail makes LHR easier to use? I’m sure that’ll happen to some extent, though under current plans Crossrail won’t serve T5 (which is the only LHR terminal that can handle domestic flights), so it’s not quite as useful as it should be.
     You mention short check in times, but LCY scores even higher on arrivals. If I’m arriving into LCY on a domestic route (which I do fairly often), I can expect to be on a DLR train departing the airport within 10 minutes of wheels hitting runway. Heathrow will never be able to compete with that.

278. @SFD
     Already reports that the Canadian Immigration website has crashed, and the movement for California to leave the Union has acquired a number of new followers:
     http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2016/11/09/california-secedes-trump-wins/93528334/
     http://uk.businessinsider.com/canadian-immigration-site-crash-election-2016-11?r=US&IR=T

     All of this could affect future travel projections.

279. Re Island Dweller,

     “T5 (which is the only LHR terminal that can handle domestic flights)”

     T2 also has a domestic & RoI channel* which means you can be at the central terminals tube station in less than 10 minutes from wheel stop if you just have hand luggage. (They learned from other airports and the existing Heathrow experience.)

     *Essentially a set of double doors from the arrivals area from those gates (the 8 on the southside of the main terminal building) allowing access straight into the south side of the baggage hall.

     Heathrow are learning even if glacially compared to other airports and Gatwick are working on speeding up domestic & Ireland arrivals too.

     LCY can’t be complacent.

280. The RoI that ngh mentions means Republic of Ireland, not Return on Investment…

281. …and strictly speaking it is CTA: the common travel area, which includes the Channel Islands and Isle of Man as well as the Republic of Ireland

282. And Brexit could potentially mean the end of the CTA including the Republic…

283. When you fly in to Southampton there is a line of three doors into the terminal from the apron. One for international arrivals takes you through passport control into the baggage reclaim, from where you go through customs. One for Channel Islands arrivals (lots of them at Southampton) allows you to skip passport control, and one for UK arrivals goes into a separate small baggage reclaim so that you can also skip customs. There are sufficiently few flights that they can ensure only one door is unlocked at a time.

     So DH is partially incorrect. The CI are in the CTA so don’t need passport control but you do need to go through customs (red or green channel). As Ireland is in the EU arrivals from there do not need to go through customs. I have never flown into Heathrow T2 but I guess that the domestic/RoI channel does not have customs so is not suitable for CI arrivals.

284. Mark says “As Ireland is in the EU arrivals from there do not need to go through customs”. I am now confused. I have, I think, often gone through customs (as well as passport control) when arriving in the UK from another EU country. (Not sure whether I /always/ do though – I just go where the signs tell me, without thinking too hard).

285. As for Brexit meaning the end of the common travel area – this is improbable because of the long and highly permeable inner-Ireland land border, which can easily be crossed without even meaning to.

286. EU. Don’t go through customs? Sort of. Most UK airports have a special lane for EU arrivals, allowing you to (in theory) bypass the customs area. In practise, customs officers can stop you and challenge you to ensure you’re complying with the rules – are the items for your personal consumption etc etc

287. @ngh. You’re right. I forgot about the Ireland route out of T2, which Aer Lingus use for flights from all the island of Ireland (north and Republic). But my ten minutes quoted at LCY is from “wheels hit runway”, not “wheels stop”. LCY has much shorter taxi routes and uses both front and rear steps (deliberately not using air bridges) – all specifically to get passengers on / off quickly.
     All that said, I accept the general point that LCY cannot afford to be complacent about the time / convenience advantage – as Crossrail does chip away at the LHR time penalty.

288. Common Travel Area vastly predates the EU/EC/EEC as it has effectively just maintained the pre independence situation with the Republic that was last legally revisited in 1948 when the automatic right of British citizenship for those born in RoI was toned down a bit too (Frau Merkel et al. probably needs to do some reading…)

     At T2 it you are dumped in the main baggage hall so still have to go through the Red/Blue/Green channels but you have bypassed passport control so it covers IoM and CI too.

289. Re Island Dweller,

     I’ve managed seat on Piccadilly line to seat on aircraft at T2 in 19minutes, Heathrow are learning. The extension at LCY will help especially when there are even the smallest problems, but like Graham I suspect they need to bite the Crossrail bullet in some form even if just a few shuttle buses to Custom House CR which should be fairly speedy.

290. Good grief. It would take me most of that 19 minutes just to take of my shoes, belt, coat, bum-bag and pocket contents, and re-install them all after walking through the magic archway.

291. @ngh – you must have been travelling light! [My record is plane seat to front door in Tallinn, including a taxi ride, in 12, but their airport is small].

292. I have managed wheel stop at JFK to hotel room by Central Park in 40 minutes which I think must be some sort of a record.

293. What about the ‘other’ London airport just off the A127?

     I once managed plane seat to station platform there in under 4 minutes, with no running. Mark you, it did take longer to get from that platform to Liverpool St than from Schipol to that platform in the first place.

     But if Anglia speed up (+ frequency up) the Southends as promised, and with flights avoiding most of the congestion in the London Air Traffic approach sectors, it would be a competitive journey time for flights from most of Northern Europe.

294. @Malcolm: the EU has a common travel area too, called “Schengen” as a nickname, which UK opted out of. So UK border control checks everyone coming from EU -but lightly. Outbound from EU those with a UK destination are handled slightly differently.

295. ngh & others
     I have only ever used Stansted…
     Are you lot, in the nicest possible way, trying to tell me (& others) that the half-hour drag from entering the fake security queue, to being able to get on the aircraft ( & maybe longer) is NOT normal?
     From tales I’ve heard, Heathrow is even worse – I’ve been there several time to meet or see people off, but never flown from said establishment ….

296. @ Malcolm, ngh and others

     As far as the UK is concerned, the CTA has existed since the enactment of the Aliens Order 1923, following the secession of the Irish Free State in 1922, apart from the period between the outbreak of World War Two and the enactment of the Aliens Order 1953.

     Following the institution of the republic, the UK, in its Ireland Act 1949, recognised that Ireland would not be “a foreign country” for the purposes of any law. The European Communities Act 1972 did not repeal or amend this position.

     Given that the CTA is the result of a bilateral agreement that both predates and is separate to UK membership of the-now EU, I cannot see that Brexit will change this – and, as an Irish national resident in London, I fervently hope it does not.

     THC

297. Small airports are great for quick transfers between planes and ground modes onwards. I once did Alghero from sat in plane seat to sat on bench out the front in about two minutes. It did help that I went for the empty non-EU line at passport control, rather than the EU line that all the rest of the plane were queuing up for, but I’m not sure whether the dirty looks I got for doing it were worth the three minutes I saved, especially as I had to wait for people in my group who had checked baggage – but they were out the airport within 15 minutes of wheels down.

298. @Si – yes, small is beautiful – something HAHA Ltd (and many other airport operators, in common with dictators everywhere – see the current postings on the Euston Arch thread) seem to forget. Some prize must go to Stewart Island (off NZ), where the plane to Landrover (GT to note ) time is about 30 sec, but I dare say the likes of Benbecula are similarly swift.

299. The airports used by FIGAS (including its hub at Stanley) tend to be quite efficient!

300. And passport control at Mount Pleasant Airport uses excellent facial recognition technology – I always get greeted by name whenever I go away or come back!!!

301. @THC
     The problem remains that you cannot combine the CTA with free travel for EU citizens in and out of the Republic of Ireland and with controls on EU migration into the UK. One of the three must go – and it certainly won’t be free travel for EU citizens in and out of the Republic.

302. Greg: from my (limited) experience, the duration of the queue for airport security is extremely variable, but I would suggest durations of half an hour are pretty rare. Going almost straight in to the check is getting reasonably common – but certainly not universal.

303. Quinlet: what you say is true. However, we need to be careful about what we mean by “free travel”. Any EU citizen can travel to any EU country without needing a visa. So this travel is visa-free. But it is sometimes not passport-check-free. You have to have your passport or identity card available in case your destination country is going to choose to check it. Almost always such a check does not occur for, say, Belgium to France, or Northern Ireland to Irish Republic. But in theory it could. Almost always it does occur for, say, France to England. And almost always it occurs for any international flight. So there is no passport-check-free route from Paris to Dublin, simply because this journey always requires either a flight or transit through the UK. (And any direct sea route would be pretty sure to require a passport check too).

304. I meant to go on and say that the UK will find it next-to-impossible to prevent, say, Polish people from visiting the UK – for exactly the reason that quinlet describes. (And most Brexiters may not even want to anyway). So they will have to fall back on making life as difficult as possible for any such “visitors”, by internal checks preventing them working, getting medical attention, housing, and so on. All rather nasty stuff. But not all that relevant to transport really.

305. @GH etc
     St Marys on Scilly is pretty quick, but when Tresco had a direct service you could be off the helicopter and into the Abbey Gardens in two or three minutes.

     On Lundy in winter, when the boat is being overhauled, the time from touchdown to the bar of the Marisco Tavern could probably be done in a couple of minutes – although you’ll have a long wait for your luggage as it comes on a later flight. The bar is also the departure lounge for the return to Hartland Point.

306. @Malcolm: You have to have your passport or identity card available in case your destination country is going to choose to check it. Almost always such a check does not occur for, say, Belgium to France, or Northern Ireland to Irish Republic

     I’m not sure that this is true. As I understand, in the Belgium-France example routine passport checks within Schengen are not permitted (hence the Eurostar “Lille loophole” could not have been fixed by checking the passports of everyone boarding at Brussels – the Belgians were quite insistent on this). Documentation checks can be introduced in response to particular events (eg. the recent refugee crisis), but not as a general matter of policy.

     Similarly, between the UK and the Republic of Ireland there is no requirement for UK or Irish nationals to even hold a passport to travel between the two countries, so there can be no basis for passport checks between them, except for third country nationals – but how do you tell who is a third country national?

307. @Malcolm
     Ian J is right. There are no passport checks between Northern Ireland and the Republic and a lot of the concern in Northern Ireland is about reinstating any such routine passport checks because for whatever purpose they are introduced, everybody would need to be checked even if only a tiny minority would be of interest. Even more, if we leave the common customs area – as we would need to if there is any attempt to put tarriffs on any EU imports – the passport checks would extend to customs clearance for both individuals and freight.

     Even when there are passport checks, this is not just about visa-free travel. Within the EU our rights to deny entry to any EU citizen are very limited. There have to be serious criminal issues behind it. If we want to change this in any way to make it tougher we are back with the conundrum that you cannot maintain the CTA and maintain free movement of people within the EU (including the Republic) at the same time.

308. Re Ian J,

     “how do you tell who is a third country national?”
     Currently they have start by proving you aren’t a first/second country national…

     Re Quinlet, Malcolm, THC

     Hence my comments about “(Frau Merkel et al. probably needs to do some reading…)” 2 days ago as there is going to be Schroedinger’s cat moment. My understanding from those close to RoI gov is that certain continental European countries have their head in the sand on these issues.

     Fire brigade, ambulance and emergency hospital use is cross border so CTA isn’t going anywhere as it will cost both governments far more in provision for those otherwise.

     The Culmore-Muff Bypasses never had any border security controls last time round so there will always be gaping holes.

     Re Malcolm,

     There are direct flights from several Irish airport to several airports in France with 3 airlines – no need to go via Heathrow! They all require passport checks.

309. @quinlet – I don’t think “reinstating” is the right word given passport checks never existed in the first place!

     Checks in the past were for security reasons, such as army or police vehicle check points near the border, or bag checks for train or coach services . Drivers needed to show their licence at vehicle check points (which don’t exist anymore) but I’ve never had ID checks using train or coach services across the border.

310. ngh: I didn’t mean to imply that you cannot fly direct from France to Ireland – but yes, I think all international flights everywhere (plus many domestic ones) require passport (or identity card) checks – though someone may come up with the odd exception.

     I do not really see how the difficulties which the UK will face if it tries to keep visiting Romanians out (or whoever are the chosen baddies) need bother Frau Merkel or anyone else – it’s up to the UK to devise a scheme, and if that turns out to be impossible, well, the UK will have to face the consequences somehow.

311. When I lived in the Netherlands I was occasionally stopped for a quick document check at a road border, if it happened to be staffed. This may have been due to my unusual number plate (AFC xxxxx) with which many border staff would have been unfamiliar. On the other hand I could drive into Germany to get my petrol where it was cheaper without seeing any sign of a border. Germans in diesel cars were coming the other way because Dutch DERV was cheaper.

312. Re Reynolds,

     Indeed there are still more checks on the Scotland -NI ferries (intra UK) today than there ever were RoI to NI.
     Particularly entertaining around 12th August when the Rangerover brigade discover British firearms licences aren’t valid in NI leading to very large piles of shotguns and cartridges in the security check areas.

     Re Littlejohn,
     The best example is the supermarket lorries in NI fill up their vehicle tanks south of the border even including the supermarket fuel tankers vehicle tanks (but no fuel leaves or enters the bigger tanks!)

313. @Littlejohn -a Belgian friend was arrested about 10 years ago (but after Schengen) for being in a “border area” without authorisation. Since that border was with Luxemburg, one can only conclude that the Treaty of London, which terminated the incipient war of Belgian independence, doesn’t apply there (as Lux post dates it) .

314. @Graham H. A Canadian colleague was similarly nearly arrested in the north of the Netherlands for not having legal title to his car. Our vehicles were registered via NATO with a (from memory) Benelux Form 5 – what a snappy name – which was unknown outside of our immediate area. Such documents can however be useful (to came back to the recent thread). I have made many trips to and within the US (pre-ESTA) without a passport or visa, by waving my magic NATO Travel Order. I suspect at last one other commenter to LR will have done the same.

315. @ Greg – I’ve not flown for a few years and previous trips tended to be long haul. I’ve never ever had a 30 min duration for the outward element of any trip although I’ve had some very quick check ins and security checks (partly courtesy of the class I was travelling). However the palaver of removing layers of clothing, belts and shoes cause issues everywhere. On the arrival leg of journeys then Changi in Singapore is the best I’ve used – think I’ve managed 30 mins there plane to land side but it’s entirely dependent on how many flights have arrived and where from as to how quickly the immigration queues move. Luggage reclaim is always fast there. Hong Kong is usually decent. Heathrow is probably worst of all. Immigration queues can be abysmal even for UK passport holders – I always feel as if the government doesn’t want anyone, including its own people, to be let in.

     Baggage reclaim is also dreadful at Heathrow. I’ve been on the first flight to land in the morning more than once and it’s as if everyone in the airport is shocked a plane has turned up. You get the feeling the place has been asleep and the plane’s arrival is some sort of rude awakening (literally). Far too easy to take 90-120 mins to get through Heathrow arrivals which is really shoddy compared to other major hubs like Singapore, Hong Kong or even Tokyo’s Narita. Obviously I am referring to long haul here, people flying domestically or short haul on business / short breaks with just carry on luggage will have different experiences.

316. Littlejohn
     How does one satifactorily establish title to a motor vehicle in the UK?
     If my question seems puzzling,read what it says on your vehicle’s V5…

317. With my lease car in Europe I have to carry a vehicle on hire certificate and a letter of authorisation. The letter basically days that I or anyone else can drive the car.

318. @ Littlejohn – Absolutely. You could also generate hours of fun by entering the US on a NATO travel order and leaving on a passport: “you can’t leave; you haven’t arrived”!

319. @Walthamstow Writer – personally, I had a very good experience with immigration and baggage reclaim at LHR this week (certainly compared to the nightmare at O’Hare…)

     LHR T5 now has high tech passport reader / facial recognition machines and these had no queues and no human interaction needed to get through border control. I was somewhat surprised that they let me through on the first attempt…

320. Slugabed,
     It’s to do with the little bit of paper that the previous owner wrote and signed saying that they sold you the car.

321. Ray K
     In my years of buying and selling motorbikes,this is only done by a tiny minority…and in any case…how do you establish the previous owner’s title…?
     Compare and contrast with the Land Registry.

322. @Reynolds 953: I’m (fairly) sure that if Amber Rudd had been on duty, you’d’ve been back in Chi before you could say “poor policy choice”.

323. @Reynolds 953
     “LHR T5 now has high tech passport reader / facial recognition machines …………no human interaction needed to get through border control”

     No use to those of us who can’t read the instructions without our spectacles on. As the first instruction to flash up on the screen is to remove them.

324. R953
     I FAIL the facial recognition machines every single time ( I wear spectacles & have a significant beard )

325. Interestingly, initially I always failed the facial rcognition and I agree entirely about the instructions to remove glasses, then not being able to read further instructions. However, I now leave my glasses on (they do have quite thin rims) and the recognition has worked very quickly on the several most recent occasions. My most recent passport photo was required to be taken without glasses. I think, however, that this may be getting a bit far from the topic.

326. Well, it is off topic. But it seems clear to me that the first draft of these instructions read: If you need your glasses on to read these instructions, then step 1 is to read all the instructions and memorise them, step 2 is to remove your glasses. A reviewer read this and suggested that anyone who has managed to get abroad and come back should have enough common sense to do this without it being spelled out, so steps 1 and 2 were omitted.

327. Greg: so do I, for presumably similar reasons. But it doesn’t matter, because on “failing” with the machine you still get to see a real person more quickly than if you had opted out in the first place.

328. Malcom …
     Err – no, but then this is Stansted, again

329. @Malcolm: Not at LCY a couple of weeks ago… The queue for the human check was huge, the queue for the e-readers, virtually non-existent. I think this might have been due to the 50% (or so) failure rate!

     I did manage to get through them despite my slightly befuddled state (and sans spectacles), but this was a cross I was willing to bear as a side effect of getting a business class seat for once! 😉

330. @Paying Guest, 11 Nov 17:18. Yes, it was you was thinking of. I never thought of ‘mixing and matching’. Would have been great fun

331. Possibly some confusion here. The human check that one goes through if one “fails” the e-readers uses a different human, and has a different queue (in my experience), from the one that one goes through if one chooses not to even try the e-readers. In my experience a much shorter one (shorter queue, not shorter human), though responders may be telling me that their experience was different.

332. @Malcolm

     “But it seems clear to me that the first draft of these instructions read: If you need your glasses on to read these instructions, then step 1 is to read all the instructions and memorise them, step 2 is to remove your glasses. ”
     But each instruction only appears on the screen after you have complied with the previous one, so you can’t read and memorise them. Also one of the instructions is to look straight at a point on the display – so even if you knew you had to do that, it’s not possible if you can’t see it.

     The queue for e-reader failures may be shorter than for refuseniks, but the time taken to queue for the e-reader, fail it, and then queue up again is longer.

333. And, IIRC, you are not allowed to “choose” the manual check, rather than going through the e-reader, even if you KNOW you are going to fail it!
     Correct yes/no?

334. @Malcolm: At LCY the humans checks are carried out by the same people as for the technology-less (i.e. Non biometric passport holders), except that you get to jump the queue, at least partially…

335. @Greg
     At both LHR and LCY you can choose freely between a manual check and an e-reader. I too, have glasses and a beard but have not had a failure at the e-reader (my preferred choice) so far. I was very disappointed when the iris recognition gates were withdrawn as this was a very smooth system.

336. Western Rail Link to Heathrow consultation opens today. See link

     https://www.networkrail.co.uk/our-railway-upgrade-plan/key-projects/heathrow-rail-link/

     Mods: if there is a better place for this, I have failed to find it. Apologies if appropriate.

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