There are many ways to kill off projects, and the Department for Transport is proving particularly adept at finding new ones. The latest is to use new technology. By that, I do not mean making use of whizzy newfangled devices to assess projects, but rather the theory that over the hill there is a completely different type of transport system that will make existing suggestions redundant.
The proposal to build a link from the south into Heathrow Airport has been around in one form or another for decades – remember Airtrack? By far the best of the schemes is Heathrow Southern Railway, created in 2016 by a group of managers in the railway industry, and which has attracted interest from American consultancy AECOM. The plan is to build eight miles of new line, mostly in tunnel, which would enable trains to connect from the south into Terminal 5, and go through the main airport station and on to Paddington.
Reproduced by kind permission of RAIL magazine
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