November 21st - Gatwick Airport gets easier to navigate to
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 21 November 2023
⏱️ 7 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
I'm on a rail route I've not done before today. That's right, I'm on the new course that's cost quarter of a billion pounds to build to transform the railway experience at London's Gatwick airport. Listen in as I explain what's different, what the owners of Gatwick are hoping to achieve and how I fared on my first journey.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast. It is Tuesday the 21st of November and I am on a very special never made before journey. |
| 0:15.0 | Yes, I'm at Gatwick Airport just looking at the Christmas tree coming through from international arrivals to follow the new course of taking me to Gatwick Airport's new station. |
| 0:29.2 | Quarter of a billion pounds has been spent on transforming the railway here. |
| 0:35.6 | And the idea is that improves safety, it reduces congestion and it gives |
| 0:41.4 | people basically a better experience. So I'm just pretending I've got off a lovely long haul flight. |
| 0:48.0 | Maybe I've just come back from San Jose. Unfortunately I haven't actually done that. I've just |
| 0:52.7 | hopped down in London but |
| 0:54.6 | going into this area which you may possibly know Gatwick was placed exactly |
| 0:59.9 | where it is because of the London to Brighton Main Railway and they decided |
| 1:06.2 | right for a second airport for the UK after Heathrow, they would put an airport here, just north |
| 1:16.9 | of the main part of Crawley and actually within the boundaries of that fair borough. |
| 1:23.4 | So what's different here is that there is not a single person coming the other way. |
| 1:31.3 | The idea is that all the arriving passengers have been put into a new area, which has something |
| 1:39.3 | of the area of a cathedral about it. And actually what you've got here looking at the board lots of people |
| 1:46.8 | peering up at it my train is slightly delayed but you can't blame the airport for that I |
| 1:55.3 | should be heading up to London Bridge the what you have here is a one-way system of the sort that you really don't see at many other |
| 2:03.0 | stations and I'm just seeing my if I find my ticket for these excellent people here. Let's see if this is |
| 2:10.4 | going to work. Hooray. Yes, it did. Thank you very much. So a one-way system which is designed to avoid arriving and departing passengers from |
| 2:23.0 | congesting each other. |
| 2:26.8 | The whole place feels much more spacious. |
| 2:30.3 | You've got a great long line of perhaps 20 ticket machines. |
| 2:35.0 | No actual sort of ticket office, although there's a helping person just waiting there trying to help people out. |
... |
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