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On Sat, 13 Mar 2010, Roland Perry wrote:

In message . li, at 13:06:48
on Sat, 13 Mar 2010, Tom Anderson remarked:

The sixth thing that's obvious is that connections from Heathrow to
Europe have to be frequent (two an hour?), because people won't move
from plane to train if they have to wait two hours for it.

Where is this apparently single point called "Europe"?

There is no single point called Europe, it's a sort of continent thingy,
just to the east of Britain. I'm not sure where you got the idea it was
point; certainly not from anything in my post.

The other day I posted a list of ten separate destinations served in a
couple of hours from the much smaller airport, East Midlands.

You might delight everyone with 2tph to Paris, but what of the dozens of
other places they might want to be going instead?

Doubtless fictional. I am even dubious about this alleged 'Paris'.

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 perhaps HS2
should serve that too.

tom

--
That's the problem with google. You can usually find what you're looking
for with a fairly simple search. It's knowing *which* fairly simple
search out of the millions of possible fairly simple searches you need
to use to find it ;-) -- Paul D

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Tom Anderson wrote:


The second thing that's obvious is that we need a high-speed service
from Heathrow to Europe, so we can cut out lots of short-haul
connecting flights.

No, it's not obvious at all.

Well, all right, if you're going to view HS2 as primarily a device for
cutting lots of short haul connecting flights, then that could be an
obvious way to do it. But it's not obvious why HS2 should be viewed
that way in the first place.

--
_
___ ___ | | __ _ _ _
(_-/ _ \| |/ _` || '_|
/__/\___/|_|\__,_||_| _
_ __ ___ _ _ __ _ _ _ (_) _ _
| '_ \/ -_)| ' \ / _` || || || || ' \
| .__/\___||_||_|\__, | \_,_||_||_||_|
|_| |___/

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In message i, at
00:53:45 on Sun, 14 Mar 2010, Tom Anderson
remarked:

The sixth thing that's obvious is that connections from Heathrow to
Europe have to be frequent (two an hour?), because people won't move
from plane to train if they have to wait two hours for it.

Where is this apparently single point called "Europe"?

There is no single point called Europe, it's a sort of continent
thingy, just to the east of Britain. I'm not sure where you got the
idea it was point; certainly not from anything in my post.

It's the part where you say "2tph Heathrow to Europe". Unless people
reckon that's been delivered when they pass Calais, 2tph to "somewhere
in Europe" is likely to be one train every two hours to Paris plus one
or two trains a day to a couple of dozen other places.

The other day I posted a list of ten separate destinations served in
a couple of hours from the much smaller airport, East Midlands.

You might delight everyone with 2tph to Paris, but what of the dozens
of other places they might want to be going instead?

Doubtless fictional.

What's fictional about a list of places (on the mainland, not holiday
islands) flown to from an airport?

I am even dubious about this alleged 'Paris'.

As far as I can see most people seem to assume that a shuttle to Paris,
plus a change of train, is equivalent to "a through service to Europe"
:(

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.

perhaps HS2 should serve that too.

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

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In message , at 09:27:25 on
Sun, 14 Mar 2010, solar penguin remarked:
The second thing that's obvious is that we need a high-speed service
from Heathrow to Europe, so we can cut out lots of short-haul
connecting flights.

No, it's not obvious at all.

He's not very clear what these "connecting flights" are, but if it's
short-haul to places like CDG (which isn't served by Eurostar, although
it passes the end of the runway), Amsterdam, Frankfurt, to get an onward
long haul, then you could have the same effect by regulating prices so
it's economic to fly direct from London.

Currently the "two leg" flights are cheaper, because the airlines
price-gouge people who insist on direct flights - and then fill up the
plane with less impatient folks for a more realistic fare.
--
Roland Perry

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On Sun, 14 Mar 2010, solar penguin wrote:

Tom Anderson wrote:

The second thing that's obvious is that we need a high-speed service
from Heathrow to Europe, so we can cut out lots of short-haul
connecting flights.

No, it's not obvious at all.

Well, all right, if you're going to view HS2 as primarily a device for
cutting lots of short haul connecting flights, then that could be an
obvious way to do it. But it's not obvious why HS2 should be viewed
that way in the first place.

Is there anything in that paragraph that mentions HS2? No. That paragraph
just says that it's obvious that we need such a service. Indeed, my first
paragraph stated a view of HS2 as primarily a Brum-Lon service; other
paragraphs went on to demonstrate that it's obvious that the short-haul
replacer service should be part of it.

tom

--
For the first few years I ate lunch with he mathematicians. I soon found
that they were more interested in fun and games than in serious work,
so I shifted to eating with the physics table. There I stayed for a
number of years until the Nobel Prize, promotions, and offers from
other companies, removed most of the interesting people. So I shifted
to the corresponding chemistry table where I had a friend. At first I
asked what were the important problems in chemistry, then what important
problems they were working on, or problems that might lead to important
results. One day I asked, "if what they were working on was not important,
and was not likely to lead to important things, they why were they working
on them?" After that I had to eat with the engineers! -- R. W. Hamming

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On Sun, 14 Mar 2010, Roland Perry wrote:

In message , at 09:27:25 on Sun, 14
Mar 2010, solar penguin remarked:
The second thing that's obvious is that we need a high-speed service
from Heathrow to Europe, so we can cut out lots of short-haul
connecting flights.

No, it's not obvious at all.

He's not very clear what these "connecting flights" are, but if it's
short-haul to places like CDG (which isn't served by Eurostar, although it
passes the end of the runway), Amsterdam, Frankfurt, to get an onward long
haul, then you could have the same effect by regulating prices so it's
economic to fly direct from London.

Apologies, i should have been clearer. I was thinking of passengers
arriving at Heathrow from outside Europe, and then heading on to places in
Europe. I understand from this business about Heathrow being a 'hub' that
there is quite a lot of these passengers.

tom

--
For the first few years I ate lunch with he mathematicians. I soon found
that they were more interested in fun and games than in serious work,
so I shifted to eating with the physics table. There I stayed for a
number of years until the Nobel Prize, promotions, and offers from
other companies, removed most of the interesting people. So I shifted
to the corresponding chemistry table where I had a friend. At first I
asked what were the important problems in chemistry, then what important
problems they were working on, or problems that might lead to important
results. One day I asked, "if what they were working on was not important,
and was not likely to lead to important things, they why were they working
on them?" After that I had to eat with the engineers! -- R. W. Hamming

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On Sun, 14 Mar 2010, Roland Perry wrote:

In message i, at 00:53:45
on Sun, 14 Mar 2010, Tom Anderson remarked:

The sixth thing that's obvious is that connections from Heathrow to
Europe have to be frequent (two an hour?), because people won't move from
plane to train if they have to wait two hours for it.

Where is this apparently single point called "Europe"?

There is no single point called Europe, it's a sort of continent thingy,
just to the east of Britain. I'm not sure where you got the idea it was
point; certainly not from anything in my post.

It's the part where you say "2tph Heathrow to Europe". Unless people
reckon that's been delivered when they pass Calais, 2tph to "somewhere
in Europe" is likely to be one train every two hours to Paris plus one
or two trains a day to a couple of dozen other places.

Fair enough. All of which reinforces the point about needing high
frequencies - 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.

The other day I posted a list of ten separate destinations served in a
couple of hours from the much smaller airport, East Midlands.

You might delight everyone with 2tph to Paris, but what of the dozens of
other places they might want to be going instead?

Doubtless fictional.

What's fictional about a list of places (on the mainland, not holiday
islands) flown to from an airport?

That was a joke. I was being theatrically dismissive of your argument for
an attempted comic effect.

I am even dubious about this alleged 'Paris'.

As far as I can see most people seem to assume that a shuttle to Paris,
plus a change of train, is equivalent to "a through service to Europe"
:(

Yes, sorry. 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 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.

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!

tom

--
For the first few years I ate lunch with he mathematicians. I soon found
that they were more interested in fun and games than in serious work,
so I shifted to eating with the physics table. There I stayed for a
number of years until the Nobel Prize, promotions, and offers from
other companies, removed most of the interesting people. So I shifted
to the corresponding chemistry table where I had a friend. At first I
asked what were the important problems in chemistry, then what important
problems they were working on, or problems that might lead to important
results. One day I asked, "if what they were working on was not important,
and was not likely to lead to important things, they why were they working
on them?" After that I had to eat with the engineers! -- R. W. Hamming

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In message , at 10:08:51 on Sun, 14 Mar
2010, Roland Perry remarked:
What's fictional about a list of places (on the mainland, not holiday
islands) flown to from an airport?

As an update, I'm at Luton airport at the moment... flights leaving
between 18.00 and 19.10 a

Glasgow (hmm)
Geneva
Barcelona
Nice
Amsterdam
Milan
Berlin
Belfast (Not HS capable)
Paris
Dortmund

There's an electric railway at the bottom of the hill, with frequent
(but slow) trains to St Pancras. Unfortunately, from further north than
Bedford there's only 1tph (which is why I drove, in addition to an
aversion to trying to use railways to do anything predictable on a
Sunday).

[1] Interestingly, none of these are what I'd call "winter-sun holiday
destinations", which tend to dominate at some other regional airports.
--
Roland Perry

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In message , Roland Perry
writes

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.

However, Paris is (by a considerable margin) the most popular
destination from Heathrow, with 60 flights a day (despite Eurostar).

Second most popular are Amsterdam and Dublin (50 flights), after which
comes Frankfurt (40 flights), New York (42 flights), Edinburgh (40
flights), Manchester (36 flights), Brussels (30 flights), Glasgow (28
flights) and Aberdeen (also 28 flights).

Amsterdam might lend itself to a direct train service, especially now
that the high-speed line from Brussels is open, but it's quite a dog-leg
of a journey from London, and would take considerably longer than flying
even allowing for the long check-in times at airports. Frankfurt is
another possible destination, via the new fast line to Cologne.

But what is really needed to reduce flights from Heathrow is a direct
train service (HS2) to Edinburgh, Manchester, Glasgow and possibly
Aberdeen, since a very large amount of Heathrow's traffic is actually
domestic.
--
Paul Terry

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"Roland Perry" wrote in message
...
In message i, at
00:53:45 on Sun, 14 Mar 2010, Tom Anderson
remarked:

The sixth thing that's obvious is that connections from Heathrow to
Europe have to be frequent (two an hour?), because people won't move
from plane to train if they have to wait two hours for it.

Where is this apparently single point called "Europe"?

There is no single point called Europe, it's a sort of continent thingy,
just to the east of Britain. I'm not sure where you got the idea it was
point; certainly not from anything in my post.

It's the part where you say "2tph Heathrow to Europe". Unless people
reckon that's been delivered when they pass Calais, 2tph to "somewhere in
Europe" is likely to be one train every two hours to Paris plus one or two
trains a day to a couple of dozen other places.

The other day I posted a list of ten separate destinations served in a
couple of hours from the much smaller airport, East Midlands.

You might delight everyone with 2tph to Paris, but what of the dozens of
other places they might want to be going instead?

Doubtless fictional.

What's fictional about a list of places (on the mainland, not holiday
islands) flown to from an airport?

I am even dubious about this alleged 'Paris'.

As far as I can see most people seem to assume that a shuttle to Paris,

For most destinations Brussels is a better connecting point, even if only
because you don't have to change stations

tim