The sales were part of GIP's strategy to syndicate the equity portion of the original acquisition by issuing bonds to refinance bank debt.

Although this entails bringing additional investors into the airport, GIP aims to retain management control.

The Windsor and Reading lines will lose a third of services.

Clapham Junction, which handles more trains than any other station in Britain, will operate a queuing system, as will Wimbledon.

On the main lines from Bournemouth, Southampton and Winchester, morning rush-hour services will be cut by 54 per cent.

For most suburban lines, serving Wimbledon, Kingston and Dorking, three-quarters of trains will be axed.

Therefore, platforms 1-10 at Waterloo will be closed from 5-28 August, up to and including the August Bank Holiday weekend, so they can be extended.

Passengers are being told to use the Underground instead. Southern says that some rush-hour trains from London Victoria to Gatwick and Brighton will not call at Clapham Junction, “to prevent overcrowding at the station”.

While continuing to dominate scheduled operations at Gatwick for most of the 1980s, BCal was also one of the airport's major charter airlines until the end of the 1970s (together with Dan-Air, Laker Airways and British Airtours).

As a result of conditions imposed by Britain's Monopolies and Mergers Commission on the takeover of BCal by the then newly privatised British Airways (BA) at the end of the 1980s, Dan-Air and Air Europe assumed BCal's former role as Gatwick's dominant scheduled short-haul operator while BA continued in BCal's erstwhile role as the airport's most important scheduled long-haul operator.

On a typical working day, more than 300,000 travellers pass through the central London hub that connects the capital with the south-west suburbs, Surrey, Hampshire and beyond.

But for the next three weeks, most stations on the South West Trains network will see the number of rush-hour trains more than halved.