Future of Heathrow Express

[The Planner]

Whenever the 'initial work' was, by the time of the London and SE RUS (in 2011) it clearly suggests 8 tph to the WCML. It is repeated in a number of paragraphs, so unlikely to have been a typo.

That was 2011, the intial work I am talking about is 2014 based and seperate to any RUS findings and was more HS2 related.

 

[Class 170101]

The Stansted Express is a good example of poor utilisation of railway capacity. Fitting these trains onto a congested railway has had negative effects further than one might think - lack of paths into Liverpool Street has in turn led to most of the Cambridge-London market being transferred to King's Cross, with consequential capacity issues on that route. At least HEx doesn't share the same tracks as stopping services.

That was a BR decision though.

Prior to 1991 the main service from Cambridge was via Liverpool Street (and some travelled onwards to Kings Lynn). BR made the decision to focus Cambridge and Kings Lynn services to Kings Cross and leave Liverpool Street to focus on Stansted Airport. It is also much quicker to travel to Kings Cross than Liverpool Street from Cambridge (by over 15 minutes).

The problem has now come that Stansted is seen by AGA (and NX before them) as an important revenue and profit generator as where as local services are not seen as so.

In the peaks you still have a few Liverpool Street to north of Cambridge services which are the remains of the BR service which remained at privatisation for city bound commuters and are written as PSR requirements for the franchise holder. The Stansted service also dropped to a 30 minute frequency in the peaks to allow capacity for other commuter services. Now because of revenue and profit motives noted in the last paragraph Stansted services operate every 15 minutes throughout the peak but with additional stops, also throughout the day at Harlow Town and Bishops Stortford to maintain the number of services at these major stations.

Some of the capacity issues may be solved by Crossrail 2 proposals but these are unlikely to come to frutition for at least 15 years.

 

[Altnabreac]

That was 2011, the intial work I am talking about is 2014 based and seperate to any RUS findings and was more HS2 related.

Well you have the advantage on us there. I'm not aware that the 2014 work ever had a published tph or service pattern?

There was some decent stuff published on the infrastructure required at OOC but not so much on services.

The 8tph was in the 2011 RUS and as far as I'm aware is the last published figure for a WCML crossrail service.

 

[Peter Sarf]

.....


Personally, the one thing that does (currently) shunt me towards HEx more often than not is the number of unplanned, unpredictable, multiple, stuttering and sometimes inescapable delays on the Piccadilly.

By contrast, in 15-odd years, and despite knowing that things do go wrong, I have never sat on the GWML for more than about 3 minutes in total on any given journey.

There's a fair, I think, comment that one of the burdens that the Piccadilly to Heathrow has to bear is that it can be easy to judge it on the basis of overall Tube reliability. HEx, by contrast, arguably manages to distance itself quite successfully from the challenges of the generality of National Rail services.

I swear the Heathrow Express has been suspended sometime n the past few weeks dou to some problem. I saw it more than once while checking the Travel info for Rail on the BBC text service.

Mind you the Piccadilly line has offended too.

For me I see the Piccadilly line is a fall back for the X26 bus from Croydon.
But Then if the Piccadilly line is screwed I can then dash to Paddington for the HEX.
It all falls apart if I get stuck halfway along the line though which is the advantage of the bus !. This argument is totally irrelevant if there is no convenient bus - suppose I lived near Paddington.
I always leave far too much time for check in anyway. The only time the X26 bus failed me was when one of our group behaved as though leaving the house at about the time the bus should depart was fine :-x. Fair enough my flights are mainly for long haul leisure but if I was flying for work I might view the frittering away of my personal time differently .

 

[paulravuslante]

Today I came back from a short trip to Berlin, and literally missing my Heathrow Express service by seconds, I got chatting to the guy on the platform and got to talk a bit about Crossrail like where the trains would actually stop and so on.

With further chatting, he then said about nobody knowing what was going to happen to the Heathrow Express and that people were fearing for their jobs. Now I believe it's safe for a fair few years yet, but it seems that internally people are already looking elsewhere.

Is there really a company wide view that HEX will be axed, and everyone made redundant? If so, management perhaps need to give some reassurances?

He said people are leaving in large numbers, including three senior managers in just one week - many going to Crossrail. The reason is so people can get their 'feet under the table' but I didn't even know that they'd be taking that many people on this early (although I suppose it's not actually that far away now).

If too many people leave HEX then surely there will be a risk to services? Certainly the usual problem of the best people going, meaning quality falls and people begin to notice, which causes a reduction of users....

Does anyone on here work for HEX and can clarify things or go into more detail? I always thought HEX was the company a lot of people wanted to go and work for!

It depends who you ask really... I work there as a driver and was considering leaving a few years ago but an effort is being made now in cooperation with the unions, with a view to retaining enough staff for when Crossrail starts. Pay is of course being looked at, our roster is quite nice (6 days on and 4 days off at least) as well as a few other perks. So I'm considering staying whilst the going is still fairly good.

The old guard of the customer service staff (CSRs who you probably met on the platform) are somewhat unhappy as their dispatch competency has been stripped from them and their grade will no longer receive any pay increases. Dispatchers still exist at Paddington though but those staff no longer man the ticket offices or trains. New staff dubbed 'Customer Hosts' are being taken on regularly now who are paid less than the old grade and will perform customer service train / ticket office duties. Some of the CSRs have transferred to being CSAs at T5 LUL side too.

The management line before was to say we are looking to run services on the 'Western Access' route to Slough and Reading and that would secure HEx's future. There seems to be a bit of restructuring going on at the top and we seem to be getting more aligned to HAL (HQ in Paddington has now relocated to HALs offices at the airport, we no longer have a MD but a Business Lead instead) So I wouldn't be surprised if there was going to be more cooperation with Crossrail, as HAL has been supportive of Crossrail.

What needs to be remembered too is that we are not part of a franchise, we are a private operator and as such we need to turn a profit or else! So that is something of a concern and nobody seems to be sure what the future will offer.