Full details of the latest Heathrow Airtrack proposals, submitted to the Secretary of State in July 2009, and the associated Transport and Works Act application, are available via BAA's Heathrow Airtrack web page.  To link to this, click here.  (Please note that the AirTrack Forum has no responsibility for the content of the application to the Secretary of State.)

Previous work by the AirTrack Forum and other bodies:

During 2007, the AirTrack Forum commissioned consultants SDG to undertake a detailed study in to the Wider Economic Benefits of the AirTrack proposal (the WEB study). The objective was to assess benefits which may not have been captured by previous studies, in line with guidance from the Department for Transport current at the time.

This project was made possible by generous financial contributions from the then SE England Regional Assembly on behalf the SE Regional Transport Board and from the SE England Development Agency.

The study was based on data from work previously undertaken by Atkins for the AirTrack Forum - the "Outline Business Case" (OBC), published in 2004, as this was more readily available than that subsequently developed by Arup for a later study undertaken on behalf of the (now defunct) Strategic Rail Authority. The Atkins data resulted in a lower level of benefits than that resulting from the Arup work and, as a result, the associated Wider Economic Benefits calculated by SDG may also be under-reported.

The initial WEB study results, announced at the Forum's 2007 Annual Meeting, indicated that the Benefit:Cost Ratio for the project would improve by around 30% if the additional benefits assessed by the study were included. It also found the potential for further additional contribution arising from improved access to Heathrow; a potential for additional employment generation in the immediate local area to the second station in Staines, which at the time formed part of the scheme (see Infrastructure Requirements), and increased productivity throughout the AirTrack corridor.

The 2004 Atkins OBC study was commissioned by the AirTrack Forum to reconfirm the practicality and viability of the AirTrack project. It found AirTrack to be a realistic and financially viable business proposition which would bring a wide range of benefits to both Heathrow users and workers and to the wider community. A range of sensitivity tests were undertaken to demonstrate the robustness of the proposal, with the central case generating a healthy Benefit : Cost Ratio of 2.7:1.

The Executive Summary and the full Final Report from that OBC study are available below. Warning - the full Final Report is very large (12.7MB) and may take some time to download.

Click here to download the AirTrack OBC Executive Summary as a pdf document.

click here to download the full report (12.7MB)

Subsequent work completed by Arup in 2005 for the then Strategic Rail Authority (SRA) and the Rail Division of the Department for Transport (DfT), whilst identifying certain variations from the OBC, confirmed the essential conclusions of practicality and viability. The full report of that study is available for download from the DfT's website:

Click here to download the SRA/DfT report

note: you will need Adobe Acrobat Reader to download these documents - if you don't have it click on the Adobe icon below