15 JUNE 2020

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Article from BTNews 15 JUNE 2020

Crossrail to Heathrow

At the end of May, the new Crossrail/Elizabeth Class 345 trains were cleared to run into Heathrow Airport, our rail expert Andrew Sharp reports.

When the Crossrail tunnels finally open (between late 2021 and early 2022), this will allow direct travel between Heathrow and central London.  Six Elizabeth Line trains will serve Heathrow Airport each hour with four going to Terminal 4 and two to Terminal 5, adding to the twice an hour Heathrow Express service and the regular London Underground trains to the BA terminal. 

With the new trains the onboard experience is different. The older unit trains had a mixture of airline and facing seats but the 345s have a mixture of facing seats and longitudinal seating (all of which, in your writer’s opinion, are uncomfortably hard).

It has taken considerable work to ready these units with their state of the art control systems to use a legacy modernised system.  Among the benefits of the new systems are very tight adherence to the timetable and the ability to run trains closer together, fitting into a better frequency.

The campaign to add a station at Silvertown for London City Airport to connect the two operations still has some momentum, the cost seemingly small in the overall scheme of things, and the idea practical.

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OUR READERS' FINEST WORDS (All times and dates are GMT)

All comments are filtered to exclude any excesses but the Editor does not have to agree with what is being said. 100 words maximum


Nick McDermott,

Tosh - We've had direct travel between Heathrow and Central London since the 1970's - what you should have said is 'direct travel between Heathrow and Canary Wharf via Central London'!


andrew sharp, St Albans UK

At the moment during lockdown there are two Heathrow Expresses each hour. The normal service is four an hour, and this will resume as soon as it is sensible to do so.


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