Thameslink

Thameslink is a 68-station main-line route in the British railway system running 225 km (140 mi) north to south through London from Bedford to Brighton, serving both London Gatwick Airport and London Luton Airport, with a suburban loop serving Sutton, Mitcham and Wimbledon and a suburban line via Catford and Bromley South to Sevenoaks. It opened as a through service in 1988 and by 1998 was severely overcrowded, carrying more than 28,000 passengers in the morning peak. Almost all the services are currently operated by Thameslink.

The Thameslink Programme is a major £5.5 billion scheme to extend the service to a further 100 stations and to greatly increase capacity on the central London section to accommodate more frequent and longer trains, scheduled for completion in 2018.

In January 2016 a proposal was put out for consultation that responsibility for some local London rail services, but not necessarily including Thameslink services, might be transferred from the Department for Transport to Transport for London, to create a London Suburban Metro.

Gatwick Airport

Gatwick Airport(IATA: LGW, ICAO: EGKK) is 2.7 nautical miles (5.0 km; 3.1 mi) north of the centre of Crawley,West Sussex, and 29.5 miles (47.5 km) south of Central London. Also known as London Gatwick, it is London's second-largest international airport and the second-busiest (by total passenger traffic) in the United Kingdom (after Heathrow). Gatwick is Europe's leading airport for point-to-point flights and has the world's busiest single-use runway, with a maximum of 55 aircraft movements per hour. Its two terminals (North and South) cover an area of 98,000 m² (1,050,000 sq ft) and 160,000 m² (1,700,000 sq ft), respectively. In 2015, 40.3 million passengers passed through the airport, a 5.6 per cent increase compared with 2014.

From 1978 to 2008, many flights to and from the United States used Gatwick because of restrictions on the use of Heathrow implemented in the Bermuda II agreement between the UK and the US.US Airways, Gatwick's last remaining US carrier, ended service from Gatwick on 30 March 2013. This leaves Gatwick without a scheduled US airline for the first time in over 35 years. The airport is a base for scheduled airlines British Airways (BA), EasyJet, Monarch Airlines, Norwegian Air Shuttle and Virgin Atlantic and charter operators such as Thomas Cook Airlines and Thomson Airways. Gatwick is unique amongst London's airports in its representation of the three main airline business models: full service, low-/no frills and charter. As of April 2015, these respectively accounted for 30 percent, 64 percent and 6 percent of Gatwick's seat capacity.