Cross-your-legs-rail! Don’t get caught short on new £15billion line – the trains have no loos
PASSENGERS travelling on state-ofthe-art trains along a new £15billion, 60-mile rail line will need strong bladders – because none of the carriages will have a loo. The fleet of 70 Bombardier Class 345 trains – built in Derby and costing well over £1billion in total – will cover the 102-minute journey on the Crossrail service from Reading in Berkshire to Shenfield in Essex. Anyone caught short will have to get off the train to use station toilets. Some of the lavatory-free trains are already running on shorter journeys along the Elizabeth Line, which won’t be fully completed until December 201 .
It will take in Reading, Heathrow, Liverpool Street, Paddington, Abbey Wood in south-east London and Shenfield.
Each 200m train will be almost twice as long as a London Tube train, and will carry up to 1,500 people at peak times.
Transport for London, which is overseeing the partly public-funded project, said adding toilets would ‘displace’ 600 passengers an hour. But the prospect of making the full journey without a toilet on board has unnerved some.
Valerie Graves, from Tilehurst in Reading, said: ‘Many passengers will be elderly and disabled, parents of young children, not to mention anxious travellers.
‘Trains break down, signal failures occur, and many stations do not have working toilets. These trains will not be like Underground trains, which go much shorter distances than Crossrail.’
A TFL spokesman said: ‘The Elizabeth Line will be a high-frequency, metrostyle service. The average time a passenger will travel will be 20 minutes.’