The engineers Arup have published some odd, but appealing plans for extending the Eurostar to Hethrow and interconnecting with rail services to the West. This is a welcome addition to the various proposals to extend high speed rail to the North. Click on the pic to the left. Remarkably only about 20% of passengers arrive at Heathrow on tube or train combined. The large (3MB but only a few pages) pdf below has what sketchy details they can provide.
It looks like Heathrow are aligning this with proposals for a third runway – to get away with that they need ways of shifting more passengers from the airport than the roads can ever hope to offer and free upcapacity by replacing short haul flights with rail (as the Paris Brussels services do for CDG). For Kings Cross this might be good news with a fast link to Heathrow – Crossrail (which Boris will have toruble funding) doesn’t make for an ultra quick transit (see previous piece on Crossrail here). The odds of this being built are slim and a long way in the future.
High speed to the West is more attractive than high speed to the North – the ECML can be sped up with existing rolling stock by removing some pinch points on the line that cause the ’125s’ to slow repeatedly from high speed. The marginal benefit of faster trains is low. Whereas getting to the West faster needs a more radical think.
