Gatwick Express to be scrapped

[LTNman]

Passengers' groups have welcomed plans to axe the dedicated rail service between London and Gatwick Airport in order to ease overcrowding on one of the UK's busiest lines.


Gatwick Express trains will no longer run non-stop from the airport to London Victoria, and airport-bound passengers will have to compete for seats with commuters from the south coast, under proposals by the Strategic Rail Authority.
The SRA says the Gatwick Express is often only half-full, whereas
mainline services to Brighton in Sussex are regularly 30% over capacity with hundreds of people being forced to stand.

[skybird]

Got any more info on this? Nothing on the Gatwick Express website...

[LTNman]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1255259,00.html

[surely not]

Methinks the SRA have got this wrong. The regular Commuter trains are not designed to cope with the luggage of the airline passengers, especially those arriving from long haul!

If the service is taking too much capacity out of the system at peak times, then reduce it back to 3 an hour, but to finish it completely is a retrograde step.

[WHBM]

Panic not everybody !

The Strategic Rail Authority is going to be scrapped. This was one of the announcements in the Government White Paper "The Future of Rail" which came out in the summer. Rail planning functions (like this sort of decision) are being transferred to the Department for Transport.

So they're going out with a bang and some gross nonsenses, although not as big as some they have pulled previously (such as wrecking the London to Manchester train service which has given such a gift to the airlines on that route - ask VLM where their London City to Manchester passengers have transferred from).

But BAA, BA at Gatwick, and the existing operator of Gatwick Express, are adept at lobbying politicians to avoid such hare-brained schemes. And I am sure they will. The untruths and partial statements that the SRA came up with for the Times article are very easily rebuffed.

Incidentally, it is said that when the trains were privatised, anyone with any commercial ability went to the train operating companies like Gatwick Express. The technically able staff went to Railtrack, where they floundered in the new privatised world until it went bust on them, while the British Rail plonkers left over got stuck with the SRA and its ilk.