These days if you want to get a train from London to Heathrow Airport you’ve got a few options.
You can get on the Piccadilly Line and take a very long trek out through West London to one of the Heathrow terminal stations.
This is often a pretty grim hour-long experience, especially in summer. The carriages are crowded and sweltering, and passengers are trying to manhandle huge suitcases on trains that have no luggage storage.
Then there’s the Heathrow Express or TfL rail from London Paddington, which takes about 45 minutes.
Soon the Elizabeth Line will also provide new services from the airport direct to central London.
READ MORE: The forgotten Zone 1 London railway station hidden in plain sight
But did you know that the station you used to get off at, at Heathrow Airport, was never really meant to be there?
Heathrow Junction Railway station was actually born out of a total disaster.
Back in the 1990s, when the Heathrow Express line was being built to connect Paddington directly to Heathrow, a section of it, which passed through a tunnel, was fraught with problems.
The contractors and airport had chosen to use the New Austrian Tunneling Method to build the tunnels.
This involved using a machine to dig out the tunnels, and then very quickly spraying shokreet (pressurised concrete) onto the tunnel walls to seal them.
Although well proven in rock, the method had not been used in a large scale in clay.
The huge hole that appeared in the ground while building the Heathrow Express line (Image: Vic Crawshaw/Daily Mirror)
But, alarmingly, the tunnel collapsed near the airport.
This caused work to be halted and a knock-on affect on the Piccadilly Line services taking passengers to and from the airport.
A humongous hole opened up in the clay and had to be plugged somehow.
Piles had to be driven into the clay in a 60-metre ring around the site to stop the collapse spreading.
As a stop gap for airport passengers, a new station was built at Stockley Park, which is slightly to the north of the airport, and a line to it was built along a disused canal called “Broad’s Dock”.
Trains carried passengers from Paddington to Heathrow Junction – a journey which took about 12 minutes – and shuttle buses took them onto the airport.
But it was short lived.
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Heathrow Junction opened on the January 19 1998, and closed just six months later, on June 23 1998.
A massive effort by the construction companies had shortened a potential two-year delay to just six months.
You could now travel from Paddington straight to Terminals 2, 3 and 4.
So Heathrow Junction station was shut, and within just 10 days the track had been lifted.
There’s nothing now left of the lost station.
The IanVisits website describes the site as an “unremarkable service road for an estate of large warehouses”.
But for one very brief period in the 90s, it was where you got off to get to Heathrow airport.
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