The West Drayton to Staines line terminated at Staines West station. The Station building in Staines is still there but was converted to a house many years ago, The line ran across the remote Stanwell Moor area with a station at Colnebrook and a wooden 'halt ' at Poyle which was basically a wooden platform and hut in the middle of the moor and which to my horror at the time was claimed to have been burned down by a friend of mine. Considering the number of rail lines around LHR it is incredible they took so long to build the Heathrow express line and even then failed to connect it to the Westward part of the GWR line whereby it could have gone on to Reading which must have the best connectivity to anywhere in UK . Basically the entire country except for East Anglia.
Cains Lane is still there as junction off the A30 , the turning after the now famous Myrtle Ave, I didn't know it origibnal went right across the airfield I just thought it was little residential road in Bedfont . I also dont know why back then, 1965 , no one spotted from Myrtle Ave .
To all intents and purposes LHR was my home town , I grew up and got married in Stanwell to a girl from Cranford who I met in Longford who worked for both BA short haul and long haul (back then moving from one to the other was basically seen as treachery) . My rather was BEA Ops my father in law BA Ground Ops , my wife BEA engineering secretary later Speedbird London HF-SSB operator . My best man BA cargo and I played footbal for two airprot teams ever though I never worked there. itwas different living there comapred to most places because certainly in Stanwell back then most people worked at LHR/LAP . When the Airways Housing trust or whatever it was called developed a large new estate based around Clare Road virtually evryone worked at LHR mostly of course for BEA/BOAC although there were some ministry people too. Of course all those shiny planes ,especially the early jets were a complete fascination with destinations that were far more exotic back then than in todays shrunken global world
Having moved to the west country i miss it for all sorts of reasons, down here an airliner is the silver dot at the end of a contrail
Sorry for the thread drift but like several this has been a real nostalgia thread for me