Airport railways: Making a difference to the passenger

A rail connection gives a boost to an airport. Airports across Africa should not be left behind as there are immense benefits in getting right the connection between air and rail transport. The number of air rail links is also increasing around the world. This remarkable increase is fuelled by a desire to improve accessibility and environmental performance and to provide choice for passengers.

When accessibility to an airport is improved it enables air passengers to get to and from the airport more easily, so that the airport can attract more passengers from a wider catchment area. Examples from Europe and North America point to the fact that most air-rail links serve the city centre or downtown area, but others spread out in other directions to link with suburbs, other towns, or even distant cities.

Experts say light rail is cheaper and easier to build. It can tolerate steeper gradients and tighter curves than heavy rail and is therefore easier to fit into an urban environment. It is said to be particularly good for employee transport as a result of its good in-town distribution. There are airports where staff have a more significant share of the rail traffic. Some categories of staff provide services which matter a lot to the image and passenger experience at an airport. The airport depends to a large extent on people like cleaners, retail and catering staff and baggage handlers who are not particularly highly paid. They need an alternative to driving and especially to the high costs of buying, licensing, taxing and insuring a car in the first place.

At Leipzig-Halle, in Germany, it was reported that rail was being used as a weapon in the fight for traffic with the airports of Hanover and Berlin. The airport authority was reported to have funded a moonlight check-in facility at Magdeburg station, equidistant between the three airports. Passengers paid €10 to check-in there – and they were doing so. It was reported to have had a real impact on mode choice and choice of airport.

Look at this reported service in Asia-Pacific region as another example: First the passenger is able to check bags from his or her airport of origin to Kuala Lumpur Sentral Station in downtown Kuala Lumpur. From a pre-booked VIP service, one is met at the airport as the passenger comes out of immigration. Afterwards, one is guided to baggage reclaim and passenger and bags are taken down to the train. At Sentral station, one is escorted up to a desk where a limousine driver greets the passenger and takes the passenger to the hotel or office.

In France, there is the reported airlines code-share with SNCF (French Railways) between Paris Charles de Gaulle airport and about a dozen domestic destinations in France as well as Brussels. When this arrangement was put in place, there was only one flight a day between Paris and Brussels, operated by the Belgian airline Brussels Airlines: the rest are air-rail code-shares between Air France and SNCF. The scheme started for environmental and economic reasons. I recall in 2018 going to Brussels at a time when Air France was on strike, yours truly stopped in Paris and completed the trip to Brussels by rail. The Belgian airline operated the aircraft for that trip from Lagos, Nigeria.

A flight from Singapore to Stuttgart, may result in a change at Frankfurt – and if the passenger is on a Star Alliance carrier, one will probably change between plane and train there. Passengers will have an integrated ticket, with boarding passes for the flight and for the train and one’s bags will be checked through to the station in downtown Stuttgart where passengers will collect them from an ordinary baggage reclaim belt before passing through German Customs. The minimum connection time between plane and train is 45 minutes, the same as between plane and plane, says a report.

A reduction in parking revenue is one disadvantage to having rails at an airport. However, there are indications that airports can earn more from retail and commercial business than from parking. Retail income per passenger is one of the performance metrics used for performance measurement. Reports from airports in Europe point to the fact that retail income per passenger is growing and retail and commercial revenue tends to be largely profit, whereas car parks need to be staffed, cleaned, lit and policed and also is capital intensive to build.

In many countries rail is used to transport three different kinds of cargo to and from airports – building materials, fuel and air freight. As airports across Africa continue to witness infrastructure improvements the demand for connection between rail and air becomes a commercial imperative. Also the transport of other items to the airport will result in cheaper unit costs and translates into more competitive prices for products.

The case for rail and air interconnectivity does not only hold benefits for passengers, it also makes for good business for all stakeholders.

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