John Rowland wrote:
The easternmost "satellite" of Terminal 5 will be very close to the straight
section which was originally built in the Terminal 4 loop to allow
construction of a T5 station. However, that easternmost satellite won't be
built for some years. Since there will be a tracked transit leading from the
main T5 to its satellites, it doesn't seem impossible that the T5 tube
station (as opposed to the HEx station) could not have been built on the
straight spot in the loop, and people could have got from there to where
they need to be by the tracked transit. I don't think the tracked transit
being airside would be a major problem, because you could have airside pods
and landside pods using the same track, so long as they had separate
stations. But the decision seems to have been to minimise the distance
travelled by cars by building the satellites furthest from the road network
last, and to muddy the waters of the Piccadilly Line for the next 100 years
in the process. I don't know how BAA got away with that.

AIUI, BAA are paying all the costs of the new Piccadilly work - so
clearly they reckon it is more cost-benefit effective to do a whole
load of additional tunnelling and pointswork than to build the station
in the planned place and make everyone travel an additional distance on
the pod. A large part of this might well be that they don't want staff
to clutter the pod system, but would rather deliver them directly into
the main employment area.

Whatever their logic, I suspect that the fact that they're paying
probably has something to do with 'how BAA got away with that'...

--
John Band
john at johnband dot org
www.johnband dot org