A first look inside Gatwick's new £250m railway station

Simon Calder is there at 5.46am to meet the early travellers

- Simon Calder

Gatwick airport station’s new arrivals area has opened – with a promise to transform journeys.

The £250m project, which forms part of Gatwick’s South Terminal, welcomed its first train at 5.46am yesterday.

Passengers on the Thameslink service from Bedford via central London were able to use new high-capacity lifts and escalators to reach a newly created arrivals space – which has been built above seven platforms on one of the busiest railways in the country.

The experience is very different from the previous crush as passengers were funnelled into facilities built in the 1960s, when Gatwick handled around 4 million passengers a year. The Sussex airport now has more than 10 times as many, but rail station facilities have long been inadequate for the volume of travellers.

With no congestion from passengers walking in the opposite direction, the platform-to-terminal journey for most will take less than a minute. Meanwhile, people arriving on the first wave of inbound flights from Addis Ababa, Doha and New York enjoyed sole use of the rail departure concourse, which previously was shared with incoming train travellers.

Speaking exclusively to The Independent, Gatwick’s chief executive, Stewart Wingate, said: “It’s been a long time coming. We’ve been working on it with Network Rail from 2015 and it’s fantastic to see the new station open for passengers to use.

“Passengers will see an enormous difference. About 40 per cent of our passengers and staff get to and from the airport by train. In the future, we’d like to see as many as 60 per cent of our passengers and staff get to and from the airport by sustainable travel options.”