"Recliner" wrote in message
news
Getting to Heathrow from anywhere to the west is a pain.

Yes. Various rail links to the west and southwest have been under
discussion for decades, and still are. The station under T5 awaits the
line
west, but construction still hasn't begun.

Crossrail will help a little, but it's not enough.

I'm not sure why a north-to-west facing curve was never built between the
Heathrow spur and the GWML, to allow trains from Reading, Oxford, Bristol
and south Wales to reach Heathrow - even if it involved a change to a
Reading-Heathrow shuttle.

There were proposals at one time to build a spur from the
Reading-Ascot-Waterloo line near Feltham to serve Heathrow from that
direction, but I don't know whether that is still on the cards.