Crossrail history

The Crossrail Hybrid Bill was presented to Parliament in February 2005. After more than three years of scrutiny, it received Royal Assent in July 2008.

The Crossrail Act 2008 gave the route as Maidenhead/Heathrow Airport to Shenfield and Abbey Wood. Costs would be shared between Government, Transport for London and the business community.

The first ground was broken at Canary Wharf on May 15 2009, when the-then Secretary of State for Transport Andrew Adonis and the-then Mayor of London Boris Johnson launched the first pile into North Dock in Docklands, at the site of the new Canary Wharf station.

In 2010, a Government Comprehensive Spending Review shaved £1 billion off the projected £15.9bn cost, although this moved the planned opening of the central section from 2017 to 2018.

Tunnelling began at Royal Oak in 2012, and at its peak there were eight tunnel boring machines working on the project.

Bombardier is building 70 nine-car trains for the project. In 2008 a plan was announced for 600 vehicles, similar to the trains ordered for Thameslink.

Procurement was launched in December 2010, with a deal valued at around £1bn for 60 tencoach trains. Alstom, Bombardier, CAF, Hitachi and Siemens were shortlisted, but the process was delayed by a year in August 2011. The contract was eventually awarded to Bombardier in 2014.

This meant that the planned introduction of trains on the Shenfield route was delayed from December 2016 to May 2017, although this delay was designed to save costs by not having to store unused vehicles ahead of introduction.

MTR was awarded the Crossrail passenger concession, and on May 31 2015 it took over the London Liverpool Street-Shenfield metro service from Greater Anglia. Three years later, it took over the Heathrow Connect trains between London Paddington and Heathrow Airport.