Everything I learned from my sneak preview of the Elizabeth Line
Plus, your Crossrail questions answered.
The report below was originally published in mid March; the Q&A bit that follows in late April. But, since the big day finally arrives tomorrow, I thought this might be a good time to bring them out from behind the paywall. (Want to read this stuff when I first publish it? Hey, why not become a paying subsc *a single shot rings out*.)
At some point in the early 1990s, leaflets appeared at my local station suggesting something exciting: that the line into Liverpool Street was to become part of “Crossrail”, with trains redirected via new tunnels under central London. One day, I would be able to get a direct train to the West End, and even to exotic points beyond, like Reading, or Aylesbury! The only slight downside was that I would have to wait until some unimaginably distant space year like 1999.
If I had known then that I would actually have to wait until 2022 – a year so futuristic that surely we would all be living on Mars, or dead – before I got my first go on a Crossrail train, I’d have given up then and there and got really into cars or something. But I didn’t – and a few weeks ago, thanks to a press preview, I finally had the chance to take the “Elizabeth Line” from Paddington to Canary Wharf.
tl;dr: it is amazing. Andy Byford, the Transport for London (TfL) commissioner, who led the tour, told us that “one of the things that drew me back to London” – from New York, where he led the Metropolitan Transport Authority – “was this project. This’ll be without question the most spectacular railway in the world.” That’s perhaps pushing it – apart from anything else, the views from the tunnels are rubbish – but it will radically change the geography of London. It’s going to be great.
London’s wait for Crossrail has actually been a lot longer than 30 years. The term first appeared in the 1974 London Rail Study; but new mainline rail tunnels combining routes into existing terminal stations have been proposed for much longer than that.1 In its current incarnation, though, Crossrail dates to 2001, when TfL joined forces with the Department for Transport to begin planning and promoting new cross-London links. The resulting bill received royal assent in 2008, and the new line – a slightly different route to the early ’90s one, with the Aylesbury branch lopped off and Heathrow and Canary Wharf/Abbey Wood branches added on – was meant to take a decade or so to build.
As late as the summer of 2018, that was still the plan – nerd articles from that year gleefully explained the 2019 service pattern – and the scheme was regularly held up as an example of the fact that it was possible to do megaprojects without them running late or over budget. And so, the announcement on 31 August that it was, in fact, late and over budget, just like every other big construction project anyone has ever attempted, came as a nasty shock. This was quite strange, in retrospect, because if you actually bothered to look at the visible bits like stations, as I finally did for a podcast that September, it was blindingly obvious it was nowhere near finished.
Anyway – now, at long last, it is. Earlier this year, TfL finished the “trial running” phase of testing – basically, running a gradually increasing number of trains, to check the technical systems worked – which began last autumn. By the end of March it had finished with the “trial operations” phase, too: that’s seen members of the public brought in to help simulate over 150 scenarios, like a passenger being taken ill on a train, or a points failure, to see how the new line copes.
That could, in theory, have been it – but TfL decided to hold back for a few more weeks of “shadow running”, in which trains will run to timetable, but empty, just to check nothing falls over. The nightmare scenario is the one experienced by Heathrow’s Terminal 5, which opened to great fanfare in 2008, only to immediately cancel dozens of flights and lose thousands of pieces of luggage. “There is a difference between opening, and opening reliably,” says Byford.
Something that is not working reliably is, unfortunately, the first thing we saw as we entered the new Paddington station, located on the south west side of the mainline one. Above the escalators and ticket hall is a 120m glass canopy, printed onto which you’ll find an artwork called A Cloud Index. The artist behind it, Spencer Fitch, is American, which perhaps explains why it never occured that him that the blue skies required for his clouds to be seen are tragically rare in London: most days, including that of my tour, the skies are grey, rendering the fake clouds either invisible or, possibly, a slight smudge.
But never mind that now, because Paddington itself looked lovely. It’s a “box station” – a giant concrete box dug into the ground, into which ticket office, platforms and so forth can then be built – and according to Crossrail chief executive Mark Wild, “three Wembley stadiums and the Shard would fit quite comfortably within it” (horizontally, of course). The ceiling is held up by 40m concrete pillars, poured directly into place, and with aluminium cladding up to head height; light is provided by the canopy and by stylised “lily-pad” light-fittings. It’s all rather lovely.
One slight disadvantage to building an entirely new Paddington, of course, is that your trains aren’t a part of the existing Paddington, which is a pain in the backside if you want to change from one to the other. In fact, the Elizabeth Line platforms will be on Eastbourne Terrace, on the other side of the mainline station from the tube ones: getting between them was due to require ascending the escalators and crossing the concourse, which is a bit of a pain.
But! Some bright spark at TfL noticed that there was a service tunnel linking the Elizabeth line to the Bakerloo line platforms, and decided to open it to the public. This, Wild told us, will “deconflict a lot of journeys” (that is: stop people banging into each other by the mainline platforms). It’ll also act as a link between TfL’s oldest rolling stock, the 1972 trains running on the Bakerloo, and its newest, on the Elizabeth line. Cool.
(Incidentally, it was roughly at this point in my journey that, thanks to my tweets, I started to receive messages asking how I had weaselled my way onto this and how they might do the same. One of them was from a member of the shadow cabinet.)
At platform level, a pre-recorded announcement was warning of “severe delays” on the entire line – quite a good joke under the circumstances. Nonetheless, destination signs promised trains to Abbey Wood from the eastbound platform A, and terminating trains from the westbound platform B. (This lettering will remain consistent throughout the underground section of the line, to ensure the new platform numbers don’t clash with existing ones.)
This will be the first phase to open – basically, the new section of tunnel and track – with the branches being hooked on later this year. Even after that, though, up to 14 westbound trains an hour will continue to terminate at Paddington, which feels like a bit of a waste: honestly, couldn’t they have found somewhere to send them?
This raises another issue, too. One of things that places limits on the frequency of train services is the fact that, at the end of the line, the drivers have to walk to the other end of their train to reverse it out again.2 All that time, the train will be sitting at the platform, so no other train can enter – and the trains on Crossrail will be an unusually lengthy 200 metres long.
To get around this problem, trains will use a system called “auto-reverse”, driving themselves west out of Paddington, into the Westbourne Park reversing sidings and back. That gives the driver time to walk the length of the train and check it over, so that by the time they return to Paddington they’re at the right end again. This system is one of the things still being tested these last few weeks.
The trains themselves came as no surprise: they’ve been running on the western and northeastern branches – currently branded as TfL Rail – for some time, so I’ve used one plenty of times already. Being able to see the view from the driver’s cabin, currently available as a slightly half-hearted video on my Instagram, wasn’t that exciting either because you are, fundamentally, looking at a darkened tunnel. The discovery they’ll eventually have wifi was mildly diverting, but slightly marred by the fact that they do not currently have wifi.
But the journey was a revelation, all the same. Travelling seven miles east from Paddington, right across central London, took just 17 minutes. Similar journeys on the tube take a lot longer than that. On the ultra-fast Victoria line, travelling from Brixton to Highbury takes 21 minutes. Queensway to Mile End on the Central will take you 24 minutes. On the District line – which is, admittedly, the District line – travelling from Stepney Green to Earl’s Court will take 34 minutes, literally twice as long. This new line is fast.
Paddington – 1437hrs
Bond Street – 1441hrs
Tottenham Court Road – 1443hrs
Farringdon – 1445hrs
Liverpool Street – 1447hrs
Whitechapel – 1450hrs
Canary Wharf – 1454hrs
The timetable of the service I was on. Bloody hell.
And then suddenly, there we were, at the new Canary Wharf station. (Also a box station, as it happens. So is Woolwich; the other underground stations Crossrail has built are more traditional “mined stations”, in which each platform and access tunnel had to be dug out of the ground individually.) It is, annoyingly, a separate station from both the Jubilee and DLR ones, on the other side of the skyscrapers from the tube, and, bafflingly, there were tube maps which don’t feature Crossrail on the platforms there too, even though by definition the public will only be able to use them once it’s opened. But the plastic sides of the escalators are wearing fetching yellow costumes (canary, yellow, geddit?), and my god we got there quick.
“It isn’t a tube line,” Wild told us, comparing it to Paris’ RER or the S-Bahn networks you’ll find in many German cities. “It’s actually a new mode of transport.”
Honestly, I can’t understate this: this is the biggest thing to have happened to the geography of London in quite some time.
Your* Crossrail questions answered
I wrote the above in late March. In the weeks that followed, I was besieged3 by questions about the new line. And since, as a white man, explaining things is my happy place, I figured I might as well turn this into content.
What will the service pattern be?
Well, initially, it’ll be a simple shuttle between Paddington and Abbey Wood. The outer branches should arrive later – hopefully, we’re told, in the autumn, although there must be at least a chance of a delay. (At one point I’m fairly sure the northeastern branch, the one on which I grew up, wasn’t due until next spring.).
Once the full thing is open, though – what will the service pattern be then?
Image: author’s own.
In 2018 the nice people over at London Reconnections made a pair of maps showing how many trains an hour each new Crossrail station would get and where they would go – one showing peak hours services, one showing off peak.
A few things leap out at me from those maps. One is that all the trains on the Shenfield branch will terminate at Paddington, except for a few bonus services during peak hours: these will instead terminate at Liverpool Street, exactly like they already do. Oh.
Trains from the west will instead use the branch to Abbey Wood: that’s partly because timetabling is much simpler if you split the branches rather than interlacing their services; partly because because it’s more useful to run direct trains from Heathrow to Canary Wharf than it is to, say, Ilford.
Anyone on the Shenfield branch feeling sniffy about this, though, can take some comfort from the fact that they’ll get much better service frequencies than some stops on the western branches. The worst served of all (assorted Berkshire stations and, oddly, Acton Main Line) will get only four trains an hour, which is rubbish, really. Again, this is partly a reflection of demand, partly a result of more boring things like track capacity.
It does raise questions about why the Paddington terminators aren’t being sent somewhere – it just feels like such a waste. But the lack of an obvious somewhere is presumably why.
What will it do to London?
Well, for one thing, it’ll turn trips that induce migraines today into easy short hops. (Drinks in Paddington? Sure!) It should relieve parts of the tube, too, especially the Central and Jubilee lines, making journeys you’d gnaw off your own arm to avoid today plausible again.
The bigger impact, though, will be how it reshapes the mental geography of the capital. Just as the Jubilee line extension opened up the South Bank, and the Overground did the same for places like Forest Hill and Hackney, Crossrail will bring long-ignored parts of suburbia into contention as The Next Big Thing, with, no doubt, hilarious implications for local house prices. If people you know suddenly start talking about moving to baffling places like Forest Gate or Woolwich, then this’ll be the reason why.
At the same time, it’ll make it possible for bankers to live in Berkshire and commute to work on a single train, too. Byford said in March that it was the moment the outer branches arrived that’d be most revolutionary for TfL’s finances: “That’s what starts the revenue flowing in more than the central tunnel.”
Once completed, Crossrail will be the busiest line in London, taking 250 million passengers a year. That’s a lot of money that currently goes to national rail services, all pouring into TfL’s coffers.
What will people call it?
The name Crossrail has been around for decades – it first appeared in the London Rail Study, published in 1974. The new line was planned under that name, the legislation which allowed its construction used that name, and the company which project-managed it had that name. And so, pretty much everyone assumed for the longest time the new line would have that name, too.
But then, on 23rd February 2016, the government dropped a bombshell: the new line would actually be known as the Elizabeth line, to commemorate what transport secretary Patrick McLoughlin referred to as “Her Majesty the Queen’s long association with UK transport”. (Oh yeah, she’s never off the trains, is Queenie. Often to be found sitting up front on the DLR pretending to be the driver, ain’t she?)
The reaction to this from many quarters was, basically: eww. London has been naming its new lines (the Victoria; the Jubilee) in reference to the royals ever since nationalisation in 1933. But somehow seeing it happen in real time, and using the name of someone who was still alive, felt incredibly creepy. And so some people have continued to use the name Crossrail on principle; one genius even started a petition on the government’s official website for such things, demanding that we rename the Queen “Crossrail”.
For all that, though, I feel like “the Elizabeth Line” is the name most likely to stick. It’s be on the map; it’s be on the signage. And, at risk of treason, one day – almost certainly in the next few years – HMQ will cark it and naming things after her will come to feel a lot less weird.
Once upon a time, I suspect, naming things “Victoria” would have sounded jarring, too. It doesn’t now, because we’ve all got used to it. History has a tendency to repeat.
And finally, the most important question of all:
Is it a tube?
Yes. Next question.
Okay, that’s a bit more contested than I’m giving it credit for here: TfL bosses have described it as a “new mode of transport”, comparable to German S-Bahn networks or the Parisian RER. This, incidentally, is the official reason given for the fact it’s labelled on maps and signage as “Elizabeth line”, where all the actual tube lines are simply “Bakerloo” or “Circle” – even though a) if this were true you’d surely capitalise “Line”, and b) it doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense. (For what it’s worth, my reading is that TfL also worry that simply slapping the word “Elizabeth” on things before we’re used to it will sound silly.)
Nonetheless: it involves a new underground line under London, which has its own colour (even if, bafflingly, they’re using hollow tramlines of a different colour on the map). Main line-size “tube” trains have run to commuter towns in the Home Counties since the earliest days of the Metropolitan line: is this any different, really?
So, to sum up: the Elizabeth line has a better claim to be a tube than either the DLR or Overground.
Which means that, this week, London is getting a new tube line. Cool.
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If you wanted to be really generous, you could say that the notion of Crossrail is almost as old as the railway network itself: as early as the 1840s, the company that built the Regent’s Canal between Paddington Basin and Limehouse was discussing converting it into a railway, to move coal between Paddington and the docks. But that might be pushing it.
This is, incidentally, why lines in some places – like the Piccadilly at Heathrow – were deliberately built as loops. Kennington on the Northern Line has one too, a loop that runs out of the southbound platform and back to the northbound one. This will, I suspect, get less use, now the Battersea extension has opened.
Okay, precisely three people have asked me anything about Crossrail, and one of them was a family member. But I don’t care, it still counts, and I want to write about trains, okay?