Simon Calder
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Your support makes all the difference.What's wrong with Scotland? More precisely, what's wrong with Scotland's three leading airports?
The communities they serve must be miffed about the way millions are poured into new rail links for English airports, while the Scots continue to make do with slow, congested roads.
This week, the Heathrow FastTrain started running between central London and Britain's busiest airport. Today and tomorrow you can travel on the new link for free.
After that, it will become the most expensive railway in the UK - both from the point of view of the passenger (from June, at least pounds 10 each way for the 15-mile journey, with no reductions for kids), and the airport's owner BAA, which has paid close on half-a-billion pounds for the new line. Well worth the investment, though, as all BAA's airports are now connected to the rail network.
As long as they're in England.
BAA has ensured that Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted and Southampton have excellent links by train. Yet the company's three Scottish airports remain marooned from the rail network. In the case of Edinburgh and Aberdeen, main-line railways run right past the airports; a link from each would cost a fraction of the pounds 440m BAA spent on its Heathrow extravaganza.
Glasgow is Scotland's leading airport, and the fourth busiest in the UK, yet plans for a rail link to the main line a mile and a half away were shelved when local government in Strathclyde was last reorganised.
A spokesman for BAA in Scotland says the reasons are two-fold - the airports are closer to the cities they serve than those in England, and that only 12 million people in total use the company's three airports in Scotland, compared with close to 60 million for Heathrow alone. In short, he says, rail links are unsustainable.
The effect: south of the Border you can take the train to the plane; north of it, you have to queue for a bus.
Anglo-centric or not, tribute should be paid to the strides BAA has made in reducing road travel to Heathrow. Staff have been offered cash to relinquish car park passes, and awarded a 15p a mile bicycle allowance.
The latest move in the "Freeflow Heathrow" campaign is a pilot scheme to provide free transport (not just for pilots - for anyone who works at the airport). People with a Slough postcode and an airport ID qualify for a travel card covering much of south east England, gratis. (It would be a dreadful slur to say that at last there is some compensation for living in Slough.)
The man behind the scheme is Heathrow's managing director, Roger Cato, who says, "We are absolutely committed to impr oving public transport access to the airport. BAA's vision is to have 50 per cent of customers travelling to and from Heathrow by public transport." Mr Cato cannot be accused of introducing the free travel scheme from self-interest - he lives miles away from Slough, at leafy Horsham in West Sussex.
His 35-mile journey to the airport is a tricky one. Does he take the train to London Victoria and the Airbus from there, or change at Clapham Junction and go to Feltham for the connecting bus? No, he travels by car, though a BAA spokeswoman says that he carshares when possible.
Since I seem to specialise in being in the wrong place at not quite the right time, I was surprised to find myself booked on a flight back from Bangkok to Heathrow that arrived on Monday, the day the new FastTrain link began. Unfortunately, the rail tunnel from the airport won't be completed until June. Until then, you have to catch a bus to "Heathrow Junction", basically a large shed on a trading estate five miles north of the airport.
The bus I took from Terminal Four spent the first five minutes heading directly away from London, down the A30 towards Land's End. But the overall journey to Paddington took the promised 35 minutes.
The new line also provides a handy poser for dealing with departure lounge bores: If ABZ is Aberdeen and BHX is Birmingham, where is QQP? Answer: Paddington Station, London W2, now awarded an international aviation call-sign.
One more line: next weekend, The Independent Online edition acquires a special travel section, combining the best from these pages, our Wednesday travel page in City Plus, and our sister paper, the Independent on Sunday. This worldwide window can be found at www.independent.co.uk/travel
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