In message . li, at
11:31:49 on Sun, 14 Mar 2010, Tom Anderson
remarked:
if there's, say, 1 tph from Heathrow total, that means 0.25 tph to
people's actual destinations. Lots more than that is needed.

I think you'd be hard pressed to serve an arc of destinations from
Amsterdam to Madrid with four trains, let alone places further away.

I sort of dream of some sunlit uplands of the future where we have a
proper international service from London, rather than just trains to
Paris, Brussels, and EuroDismal.

I'd quite like it too - but we have to be realistic that the only way to
do this is to use the same hub-and-spoke system that traditional
airlines do. You are never going to get Bristol-Berlin through-trains as
well as a Cambridge-Rome, Glasgow-Nice and a Derby-Amsterdam (etc), even
at 1t-p-day.

I was deliberately vague about Europe because the trains could be
going to all sorts of places - a small number now, but hopefully
more in the future. Perhaps never as many as that airport, in which case

Of course, the airport I mentioned was a small regional one. Lots
more places to try to serve if you are attempting to replace flights
from Heathrow.

Replacing all of them would be impossible - replacing 50% of the actual
flights might be possible, if most of the passengers are going to a
small number of destinations. I have no numbers to suggest that's the
case, but most things are that way, power-law distributions and all that.

Surprisingly enough, the low-cost airlines fly to a large number of
destinations one or twice a day, and seem to exactly fill the planes all
the time! The only exception I can think of quickly is Geneva, where I
have seen almost hourly flights by Easyjet at weekends during the skiing
season.

perhaps HS2 should serve that too.

Apparently it will - East Midlands Interchange will be a a couple of
miles away.

Aha, not in my version of the plan it won't!

Going to build EMI under the airport? There have been some kites flown
about connecting it directly to the rail system.
--
Roland Perry