T5 – a very British fiasco?

by Simon Handby in At home on 28.03.08

Oh dear. It appears that reports of happy passengers at Heathrow’s brand-new terminal may have been somewhat overstated, as stories continue to emerge of people forced to travel on without their baggage, or waiting hours to reclaim the bags they arrived with.

Yesterday 36 BA flights had to be cancelled in what, the airline’s head has conceded, wasn’t its finest hour. According to BA’s website it’s only expecting to operate 80% of T5 flights today.

Clearly things weren’t quite ready for take off at Heathrow, then, but watching high-profile British engineering projects get off to a less than first-class start is an oddly familiar pastime. Here are a few other hitches that spring to mind…

London’s Millennium Bridge

The Millennium Bridge’s June 2000 opening has become something of a yardstick for high-profile opening day disasters, but what actually happened?

Although the bridge was plenty strong enough to deal with the large number of pedestrians eager to use the first new Thames crossing in London since 1894, designers hadn’t fully reckoned on the fact that they might fall in step with each other. Once this started, the bridge began to resonate, famously wobbling in sympathy with the pedestrians, who were forced to stride in time. This, of course, just made the whole thing worse.

Authorities tried to limit the number of pedestrians crossing the bridge at any one time, but within a couple of days it was clear that the problem wouldn’t go away. The bridge closed for nearly 20 months while engineers fitted huge dampers to prevent any motion getting out of hand.

Portsmouth’s Millennium Spinnaker Tower

What was it with millennium projects? Portsmouth’s Spinnaker Tower was originally intended to be one, but it was quietly renamed at some point during the six years of delays that led to its (slightly less epoch-marking) 2005 opening.

Hugely over budget and behind schedule, the tower chose the opening day to extract its revenge on members of the project management and building team, trapping them in the external glass lift for 90 minutes while they waited for abseiling rescuers. The lift remains closed.

Tilting trains

Although they’re running at full-tilt these days, trains that lean into bends got off to a rocky start in this country. It all began in the 1970s with British Rail boffins, who worked out that, if you couldn’t make Britain’s rail tracks straighter, you could speed up trains by making them lean around corners a bit like a cyclist does.

Unfortunately, making trains lean around bends turned out to be trickier than riding a bike. Even though the resulting Advanced Passenger Train (APT) had pretty much cracked it by 1984, people had lost faith in the project and it never saw widespread service.

The APT wasn’t helped by the first ever public run, from Glasgow to Euston in 1981, which suffered from some technical glitches. Passengers complained of queasiness at the way the train took corners. Admittedly, many of them were members of the press who were, allegedly, the worse for wear after one too many visits to the buffet car.

Skip onwards to 2002, when Virgin introduced its first Pendolino tilting trains to the UK. Delays with preparing the track meant that Pendolinos couldn’t lean either for a couple of years, but in mid-2004 Britain finally got its first mainstream tilting train service. Ironically, the trains’ Italian manufacturer designed the tilting mechanism with the help of science bits developed for the APT, and bought from BR after the project failed.

That sinking feeling

Still, they may be laughing now, but the Italians can show us Brits a thing or two when it comes to opening day disasters. And, as this footage shows, they haven’t always had the best of balance themselves.

IMAGES by Flickr users Kieran Lynam, geishaboy500 and Gene Hunt