knifeandfork

In days of yore I would have, of course, posted this in the British Railways forum aka bmi. At the going down of the sun, and in the morning etc etc

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?

irishguy28

Yes.

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/briti...w-express.html

Did you intend that T5 be the only terminal to be favoured with a Crossrail stop? Or T5 and "Heathrow Central"?

Surely "Heathrow Central" is the clearly obvious choice....if you go with the one-stop solution, then this clearly is the best place to stop.

lhrsfo

Agreed, although Heathrow Central will shortly be down to only two terminals each of which is smaller than T5. Now if there is a third or fourth runway, and T1 is built and pigs start flying, then it would be a different matter.

KARFA

All correct, stations at LHR will be Heathrow Central (1,2,3) - i.e. I think the current HEX station, and also T4. There is some talk of possibly extending the LHR branch to Staines in the future. You could also take the tube from T5 - T1,2,3 and then walk from the tube station to the rail station to get crossrail.

If went to T5 instead of T4 I would imagine everyone who flies from T4 would then complain. The fact is it will serve 4 out of 5 terminals directly, and the remaining 1 is only 1 stop away.

There is also no stop at LCY although it passes quite close. It will stop at Customs House which is on the wrong DLR branch for LCY.

Gold77

Only in England do we find solutions that minimise the impact at the expense of the flag carrier.

Do you really think this would happen in Germany, France or Italy? BA should have invested in some lobbyists...

knifeandfork

My feelings were along the lines of Gold77's.

Also, if they can have stops for 123, 4 and 5 for the other lines it seems awkward to have it for Crossrail, given how it's always been touted as the panacea for the world's ills.

Kgmm77

Wirelessly posted (iPhone 3G: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 7_1_2 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/537.51.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.0 Mobile/11D257 Safari/9537.53)

"Flag carrier" whilst a nice thought, hasn't had any real meaning since privatisation.

That notwithstanding, I find the whole Crossrail/HEX plan symptomatic of everything that's wrong with the rail system.

KARFA

There is no one transit system that stops at all the stops. HEX is 123 & 5, Heathrow Connect is 123 & 4, the tube is either 123 & 5, or 123 & 4 depending on which one you get. No one train/tube does 123 & 4 & 5 in one go.

Gold77

Technically correct but if you are in Piccadilly you can get a train (not the same train) to all terminals, and if you are in Paddington, same. But from Farringdon you won't be able to go to T5. Bit annoying.

layz

The Heathrow Connect only serves T4 on extreme early/late services and Sundays. Most of the day the Heathrow Connect runs to T123 and then runs empty and waits on the opposite platform in T5 (it annoys me that they don't allow passengers on this if it's going to T5 anyway, but then it'd lower the appeal of the Express).

Usually T4 is only served by a shuttle between T123 and 4, with the only no change option into London being the tube.

Crossrail is replacing the Connect (as in it stops at all stations to Paddington) but every 15 minutes rather than 30, it's currently planned to run to run all services to terminate at T4.

DominicB

All I can say is that if an alien life form read through this thread, they would simply wonder how on earth the whole thing could be so badly screwed up. The main airport linking to the main city with a myriad of different trains and terminals - quite dramatically messy!

KARFA

I didn't know that. Sounds like Heathrow Connect is even more rubbish than I thought. I have had to use HEX & shuttle to T4 a few times and every time I wished I had used the tube instead. The T4 shuttle seems to be deliberatly timed to not connect with the HEX services so you end up waiting for 20 mins at 123 for a shuttle.

layz

Ironically enough the reason they replaced the Connect to T4 with a shuttle was to supposedly improve the connection times with the Express.

https://www.heathrowconnect.com/stat...ort/terminal-4

The shuttles themselves are usually the same trains as the connect but painted in a HEX livery, although a Connect branded train may be used or even a real HEX train.

henners

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...

IAN-UK

Thanks for that! I had no idea the schedule/route structure was quite so extraordinarily complicated.

I've usually muddled through, occasionally relying on the patience of staff to direct me to the best option: but there have been a couple of screw-ups