FlyerTalk Forums - View Single Post - Single Heathrow Express Platform at Paddington from December
Old Nov 6, 2019, 3:07 am
  #9  
southlondonphil
 
Join Date: Oct 2019
Location: clue is in the nym
Programs: BA Gold, TP Gold, VS Gold, Hilton Diamond, IHG Diamond, Hyatt Globalist, Marriott Platinum
Posts: 818
Originally Posted by BarneyMcGrew
I quite liked this from the OP's linked article:



What about the greater good of the paying passengers?

Or perhaps in this modern un-joined-up railway they don't count.

Imagine if BA said 'We are cutting our use of runways at LHR and will now only operate on a single runway for both landings and take-offs. We don’t really want to do this, but it is for the greater good of the airline industry'.

To contextualise, this is all to do with the National Rail timetable changes on 15th December, from which point GWR is increasing the frequency of several services to the South West, the result of which is that additional platform space at Paddington is required to turn these trains around. Whilst TfL Rail is still operating its Heathrow service (ex Heathrow Connect) from 'upstairs' at Paddington resource is very tight and HEx has been determined as the service to take a temporary hit on its platform space, since blocking two platforms to run 4 services an hour is a somewhat inefficient use of platform space.

What's happening here is more akin to (for simplicity) BA having to repatriate its T3 services to T5 because other airlines need the gate space at T3.

Once the large (financial) drain that is Crossrail eventually opens platform capacity at Paddington will open up again.
southlondonphil is offline