Perhaps you'd like to point to all the myriad rail projects the governments of 1948 to 1993 chose to invest in. No? How about all the road projects? Ah yes, that's why Heathrow's got two motorways to it.  Heathrow was built right at the start of about half a century of domination of government policy by the ideology of roads, which is why it had roads built to it from day one, then upgraded pretty much every decade since.  I fail to see how the Southern Railway would have raised the capital in a world where railways were seen as declining any more easily than BR would have wrung it out of the Treasury at the time. The Piccadilly Line only got built out to Heathrow because it was very cheap to do compared with any other option and by the time BR shaped up into an efficient businesslike organisation in the early 1980s and started growing traffic the government's ideology preferred to let BAA develop a privately funded line. This is how we ended up in the absurd situation that the only mainline link to Heathrow is priced at a premium and is not included in London's centrally set fare scales, smartcard ticketing etc. like it would be in a sensible country. To illustrate quite how unlikely it would have been to have got a rail link built back then, this article from 1964 blames low usage of Gatwick on it being built rail served with no motorway: http://www.flightglobal.com/pdfarchive/view/1964/1964%20-%201071.html Many of the arguments are suspiciously familiar 51 years later. [also I note that 20 years of rail privatisation haven't resulted in SWT building tracks to Heathrow, has it?]

Entire Thread

Topic	Date Posted	Posted By
Heathrow v. Gatwick	03/02/15 11:23:00	David Cuss
Re:Heathrow v. Gatwick	03/02/15 11:33:00	Richard Greenhough
Re:Heathrow v. Gatwick	03/02/15 11:35:00	Alan Clark
Re:Re:Heathrow v. Gatwick	03/02/15 11:45:00	David Cuss
Re:Re:Re:Heathrow v. Gatwick	03/02/15 11:53:00	Ken Munn
Re:Re:Re:Re:Heathrow v. Gatwick	03/02/15 12:02:00	Julian Pavey
Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Heathrow v. Gatwick	03/02/15 12:40:00	Ken Munn
Re:Re:Re:Re:Heathrow v. Gatwick	03/02/15 12:03:00	Carl Wynne
Re:Re:Re:Re:Heathrow v. Gatwick	03/02/15 12:20:00	Richard Greenhough
Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Heathrow v. Gatwick	03/02/15 12:29:00	Carl Wynne
Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Heathrow v. Gatwick	03/02/15 12:54:00	Michael Robinson
Re:Re:Heathrow v. Gatwick	03/02/15 12:38:00	Richard Greenhough
Re:Re:Re:Heathrow v. Gatwick	03/02/15 23:44:00	Thomas Barry
Re:Re:Heathrow v. Gatwick	03/02/15 12:51:00	Will Watson
Re:Re:Re:Heathrow v. Gatwick	03/02/15 13:09:00	Alan Clark
Re:Re:Re:Re:Heathrow v. Gatwick	03/02/15 13:25:00	Jonathan Bingham
Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Heathrow v. Gatwick	03/02/15 23:55:00	Thomas Barry
Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Heathrow v. Gatwick	04/02/15 10:20:00	Jonathan Bingham
Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Heathrow v. Gatwick	04/02/15 14:48:00	Thomas Barry
Re:Heathrow v. Gatwick	03/02/15 13:15:00	Rick Sanders
Three, not two	03/02/15 15:29:00	Thomas Barry
Re:Three, not two	03/02/15 15:47:00	Richard Greenhough
Re:Re:Three, not two	03/02/15 17:02:00	Claudia Jachtmann
Re:Re:Re:Three, not two	03/02/15 17:14:00	Colin Jordan
Re:Re:Three, not two	04/02/15 00:10:00	Thomas Barry
Re:Heathrow v. Gatwick	03/02/15 19:15:00	David Cuss
Re:Re:Heathrow v. Gatwick	03/02/15 22:00:00	Claudia Jachtmann

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