One of the things that all of us dread when we head off on holiday is the idea that we might lose our luggage when we get back. And when you are arriving at an airport as huge as Heathrow, where millions of passengers check in millions of bags every year, you know the chances that some of them will go missing are pretty good. It’s human – and mechanical – error, after all.
But that could all be about to change – and passengers who have travelled through Terminal 5 since it first opened will certainly be glad to hear that! Apparently the new tunnel will run between Terminal 3 and Terminal 5, but it won’t be on its own down there. The idea is to connect this tunnel up to all the rest of the ones that already exist underground. This means that the new terminal should be much better in terms of luggage efficiency – and that is good news if you are going to end up travelling from that terminal in the future.
And you won’t have to wait too long to enjoy the new service either. Even though there have been a lot of news reports hitting the headlines recently about the new tunnel, it has actually been announced that it should be finished by this July. And it won’t simply be a slow process for the luggage once it gets going through this new tunnel either. Eight hundred metres a minute is the speed that has been quoted that your bags will take if they go on this new journey!
The actual total cost of this new tunnel is not completely obvious, since some of the reports are conflicting. One mentions a figure of £26 million, while two others mention the rather larger figure of £260 million. The machine that is boring the tunnel itself – affectionately called Beatrice by those who are using it – has cost £3.3 million alone, so this is clearly going to be an expensive and long process.
But will it solve all the problems that have been experienced by Heathrow in the long run?
Most of us don’t even give a second thought to where our baggage goes between us saying goodbye to it at one airport and being reunited with it again (hopefully) at our destination. But for those who do lose their bags it can be a nightmare.
Everyone must know that there will always be a chance that bags will get lost at some point. Heathrow, along with every other airport in the world, handles countless numbers of bags every day, so there are always going to be some that get lost from time to time.
But Heathrow will certainly want to reduce the numbers from those that were going astray when Terminal 5 originally opened. Back then it was almost an hourly event for bags to go missing, and you were possibly more likely to lose yours than to be reunited with it at the end!
So let’s hope for the best from this tunnel.