Speaking at the Guild of Business Travel Agents annual general meeting lunch last week shadow minister of transport The Rt Honourable Theresa May MP emphasised that good rail links were essential for the success of an enlarged Stansted, and also Heathrow. (No doubt she will re-emphasise the point when she opens the Business Travel Show at Olympia on Tuesday 3 February. She pointed out that there were no specific mention of this vital form of surface transport in the Government”s recent White Paper.
ABTN agrees with the would-be minister that top quality rail links are vital if the airports are to succeed. The Stansted Express is a misnomer and maybe someone should take the train operator to court under the Trade Descriptions Act. The Stansted Express is a branch line operation and nothing more. It”s no express, just a cheap, and when it was built, effective, means of connecting Stansted to central London, now totally out of date. It needs urgently replacing with a proper high-speed dedicated operation to Liverpool Street. On the other side of London the Heathrow Express is a fine railway in itself but here again it is nothing more than a branch of Brunel”s GWR (God”s Wonderful Railway) and, whilst dedicated for the most part, subject to interruptions from events on other tracks.
However as fast as one can travel to Paddington, at that point you are stuck. The Metropolitan and Circle Lines are available in different parts of the station (but going to the same places ” you have to gamble which one to go for) and the Jubilee Line is buried somewhere under the Hilton Hotel. Using public transport it could be argued that you are better off via (the much cheaper) but tedious Piccadilly Line for the centre of town. London desperately needs Crossrail from Paddington to Liverpool Street, today not tomorrow. And here our tale links to Stansted. Crossrail would help join Heathrow to Stansted in something less than 90 minutes without M25/M11 worries if the other two parts of the system were in place. The link is absolutely essential. And just over a week back the British Olympic Federation launched its bid for London 2012 (which ABTN earnestly supports). In terms of stadium and support facilities it looks good. But here again where it falls down is with regard to the transport infrastructure. True London City Airport will feature in the scheme of things but so will Heathrow and Stansted. Without decent rail links in the plans the bids will fail. These must be shown when the London presentation is delivered to the IOC in November of this year. Surely six years is enough to build two railways. Most of the plans are in place. In the UK we need to learn from the French. The sudden appearance of the Airbus A380 assembly plant at Toulouse, on a (previous) off airport site crossed by an important public road (now closed of course) shows how to get things going when the national interests are at stake.