Originally Posted by
knifeandfork
In five years time or so, we are meant to be able to get from the West End to LHR in 30 minutes in spiffy new trains on Crossrail.
Whilst doing some light d!cking around on the modern internet, I discover that there will be no direct Crossrail services to T5. Have I this right? BA pax will have to take a train to Heathrow Central and then transfer, presumably to either the HEX or the Tube.
This seems absolutely daft to me. Have we discussed this before?
It does seem daft, but it's about fighting the battles worth fighting at the time. On Crossrail that's historically engineering of the central tunnel, rather than operational and edge engineering - that's why for simplicity the western end was always publicly Maidenhead when everybody connected with the project knew it would end up being Reading.
The challenge for serving T5 would be the Heathrow Express agreement (it is, after all, a HAL operation over HAL infrastructure, earning money for HAL), that TfL would presumably have to pay compensation to end - and it's reasonable that this falls into the "too hard" category right now when the engineering is still in flow, the trains are not yet built, the service models are still under discussion, etc.
I'd expect one of the following will happen in the end:
1. Approaching go-live, an agreement will be reached for Crossrail to serve T5.
2. After go-live, the volumes of connection at T123 will incentivise an agreement to be reached for Crossrail to serve T5.
There is the extra complexity that the HEX's fast train paths to Paddington may prove to be valuable and their transfer to - say - create a Reading-Paddington fast shuttle could help everyone come to agreement...