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All change for Elizabeth Line trains on faster track to Heathrow

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New possibilities: the new Elizabeth Line offers possibilities for south Londoners, too

‘Going anywhere nice for your holidays?’ Gatwick has long been the obvious airport of choice for people from Croydon looking to jet away, but the completion of the £17.6bn CrossRail could finally provide a viable public transport route from south London to flights from Heathrow.
KEN TOWL put it to the test

A message arrives from Inside Croydon Towers: try out the new Elizabeth Line, see if it makes getting to Heathrow any easier, cheaper or more pleasant.

It proves to be two of these and, as the great Meatloaf was wont to claim, “Two out of three ain’t bad.”

It is certainly easy.

You just jump on one of the many Thameslink services heading up to Bedford or other points north via Farrringdon and change there for the central section of the Elizabeth Line.

Or, to give it its full name, the Mass Transit Railway Elizabeth Line, or MTREL for short.

Crossed rail: for now, passengers have to change trains at Paddington

Parent company MTR has interests in The People’s Republic of China, Australia, Sweden and, now a narrow strip stretching from Reading to the west of London to Shenfield to the east.

It turns out we do have a partly nationalised transport system in the UK. Nationalised, but just not by the UK. MTR began as the metropolitan railway for Hong Kong and, is majority state-owned.

I left East Croydon on the 10.31 and arrived at Farringdon 25 minutes later. I followed the big purple Elizabeth Line signs and within a couple of minutes got on the train to Paddington. Here, for the time being at least, you have to change, emerging on one side of the main hall of Paddington station and cross to the other. No problem for me but I wouldn’t fancy doing it with a couple of large cases.

The plan is to join up the separate sections of the line eventually for a single-train journey from one end of the line to the other. But for now, we will have to make do with a bit of faff at Paddington.

Hardly any wait at Paddington, and the trip is a smooth, comfortable journey overground through the light industrial estates and business parks of western London, with plenty of time to admire the new moquette.

Part of the family: the train’s seats reflect that the line is part of London’s transport

Even though the Elizabeth Line is not strictly part of the London Underground Tube family, it does have its LU style moquette, the fabric design on the seats, a rather fetching mixture of purples, blues and beige, with flashes of red and orange.

Oddly, the Elizabeth appears on the new tube maps as “Elizabeth line” alongside the other lines which are referred to just by their name, the Victoria, Central or Bakerloo, etc.

So, while we are expected to infer that the blue line on the map denotes the Victoria line, and the red line marks out the trajectory of the Central line, we need to be informed that the purple line is the Elizabeth line line. Maybe I am making something out of nothing, but it looks strange. Did someone somewhere think that “Elizabeth” by itself would sound disrespectful?

We arrived at Heathrow Terminals 2 and 3 at 11.45. So the journey, station to station, was just under an hour and a quarter. At £32.30 for an off-peak single ticket (the return is double that) it was not cheap, but it was nice and it is relatively quick.

So, if this summer you are flying off somewhere not quite as hot as London, perhaps the Elizabeth line line does offer those travelling from Croydon a reasonable alternative to having to drive, or be driven, to Heathrow or, worse, forking out at least twice as much as the train fare for an Uber or such-like.

The Elizabeth line line: offering a journey from East Croydon to Heathrow, via Farringdon in less than 1hr 15min for £32

For a change, I travelled back on the X26, the half-hourly service that costs the price of a single Oyster or debit card fare, £1.65 – about 5per cent of the new train fare.

While the X26 wins hands down in terms of money, it is pretty awful in any other respect.

The journey back, after a bit of a wait at the airport, took just over an hour and three-quarters. The seats are quite cramped, there is little space for luggage and the service seems to be designed more for airport workers than for travellers.

It has a claim to being TfL’s longest bus route, and you do get to see a lot of planes close up as the bus meanders through and around Heathrow. Some people might like that sort of thing.

Cheap and awful: the X26 does take you past lots or aircraft, though

The bus does meander a lot, though, through Hampton Wick and Kingston and New Maldon and Cheam and Sutton and Carshalton before it gets to Croydon. And there is traffic. For a while, between Hampton and Wick, our X26 got stuck behind a slow-moving 481.

The 481 is run by RATP Group, another state-owned enterprise with a logo based on the meandering River Seine that runs past its headquarters. It seems that, in this country we have the nationalised transport system that the left clamours for. It is just that it has been nationalised by other countries.

So, while Hong Kong’s offer was fast, comfortable and expensive, the bus was slow uncomfortable and cheap. I think I will stick to flying off from Gatwick in future. You can get there for £5.90 off-peak on Southern (which is partly owned by SNCF, the French state rail system) or Thameslink (also part-owned by SNCF!) and you can get there in 15 minutes from East Croydon.

Vive la difference!

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