On 22 July, 00:06, Tom Anderson wrote:
On Wed, 21 Jul 2010, wrote:
Too bad. It'd be nice to see Heathrow get a Schipol-style set up.

Or even a Gatwick-style set up.

The differerence here is that Gatwick is acutally on the logical route
of a main line between London and Brighton (indeed, the railway was
there first). The idea of routing HS2 through the main Heathrow site
has large numbers of problems:

Heathrow is a very badly connected location WRT the existing railway
network, so it would have to be an intermediate stop on the way to a
more useful terminus. Paddington is not a particularly easy site to
expand to accommodate the HS2 trains, nor is it particularly well
connected to other London railway stations, while Euston has capacity
to expand, and will have capacity freed up by the transfer of WCML IC
services to HS2, as well as being as well connected to the other
London stations as you can realistically get (especially if the Euston
Square - Euston proper connection is improved).

Going from Middlesborough to Euston via Birmingham and Heathrow will
not only be a significant diversion, but the extra mileage needed will
all be in high land value areas, full of residents who are well used
to fighting planning battles (see Heathrow expansion and the West
London Tram), so realistically the whole extra route milage will have
to be in tunnel.

Then there is the question of how much traffic Heathrow will generate
compared with a central London terminus. If, say, only 5% of
passengers to/from Birmingham/Middlesborough want to go to LHR as
opposed to Euston, will the operators actually want to stop their
trains there at all? I could well imagine the station ending up like
another Stratford International, with short distance trains stopping
there, but the long distance ones sailing through without stopping.

Then question would then present itself to any operator with a UK-
classic compatible HS train whether running Euston - (non stop at LHR)
- Birmingham - Middlesborough is actually any faster than running
Euston (WCML to near Watford, then change to HS2) - Birmingham -
Middlesborough. If not, then perhaps we would end up with a nice
tunnel from Euston to LHR and up to near Watford that has no service
at all.

The shortest distance between two points is a straight line, and when
we're spending mega-bucks to make trains run faster, it seems folly to
slow them down again by taking a reverse S through Heathrow.

Robin