I may not have been clear enough in my earlier post: it was more a lament on what ‘could have been’ with a little more joined up thinking. Certainly not encouraging any train users to switch to flying for Manchester to London.

Rather, my logic is: we are now going to be building another runway, for capacity reasons. We could have mitigated at least some of those capacity constraints through high speed rail for many domestic flights, if there was a HSR station at LHR and the political will to insist upon integrated, code-shared/through-ticketed connections as a condition of slots/rail franchises. I don’t think we could have avoided a 3rd runway in the medium term, but we could be making much better use of the assets by focusing the limited slots at LHR on international/LH connections and using high speed rail for most domestic connections. Britain has an ideal geography for it, but I fear we lack the kind of joined-up land use and transport planning plus political will that you see in places with world-class transport systems (eg Switzerland).