Crossrail delay is a blip…but still a serious one for TfL
CHRISTIAN WOLMAR is not surprised that Crossrail’s opening date has been put back, citing signalling and the volume of work to fit out new stations as key reasons
I had been expecting an announcement about Crossrail being delayed for some time.
As I am writing a book about the project, I have spent a lot of time in Crossrail’s Canary Wharf offices and talked to many people involved in the scheme. It was clear for some time that the Queen had better find something else to do on December 9, the day earmarked for several years as the day when Londoners would get their amazing new railway.
However, I was surprised by the length of the delay. I had expected that the key part of the line - the tunnels under London - would open in May. No such luck. The suggested opening date is now ‘autumn 2019’, and from past experience it is always dodgy when governments talk of things happening in a particular season rather than a month.
As Andrew Bosi pointed out in his column for the Friends of Capital Transport Campaign Newsletter, the opening is now effectively sine
die, which means it could well be 2020 before trains whizz through between Paddington and Abbey Wood.
This is a major blow to both the Government and Transport for London. It is only a few weeks ago that Rail Minister Jo ‘Hydrogen’ Johnson announced that the project’s budget would rise from £14.8 billion to £15.4bn, but while that caused some consternation, the prospect of an imminent opening (which seemed to be confirmed at the time) meant there was little negative coverage. Now, yet again, it seems that the Government does not know what is happening on the railways. For Transport for London, the effects are even more serious.
So, what has gone wrong? There seem to be two main issues. First, there is the sheer scale of the task, with ten below-surface stations having to be fitted out simultaneously.
Digging the 26 miles of tunnels was, in fact, the easy bit. It was completed within a month of the schedule, despite difficulties such as problems with the huge conveyor belts needed to get rid of the spoil and the restricted ventilation for those working behind the huge tunnel boring machine trains.
The much more complex task has been the fitting out of the stations. To illustrate the scale of the task, there are ten new below-the-surface stations in London plus one on the surface (Customs House). Each has platforms that are at least 200 metres long, all with platform edge doors that prevent anyone falling or jumping on the line.
These are massive structures that each cost in the region of £200 million to £300m, and require the installation of an array of different systems such as high-voltage electricity for the trains, ventilation, PA, gating, signalling, and so on. Work on the stations could not get fully under way until the tunnel boring machines had finished, and then the contractors took longer to fit them out than expected. That in turn led to a delay in testing, which is the underlying reason for the postponement of the opening.
If there is one issue, it is probably (as ever) signalling which is at the root of the delay. Already the new Class 345 trains that were supposed to run into the Heathrow tunnels in the spring still cannot get in there, because of problems with the ETCS (European Train Control System) Level 2 equipment. I had an entertaining Twitter discussion over precisely how many signalling systems are installed on the trains, with several people thinking it was four. But it is, in fact, ‘just’ three if both surface sections are counted as using TPWS (Train protection Warning System), even though there are slight technical differences between the East and the West.
The very fact that this discussion occurred explains why a delay was probably inevitable. The reason for having three systems was the result of a series of necessary compromises made by the Crossrail team, and takes up half a dozen pages in my book (the rest of the book is far more interesting!).
In short, according to European rules, new railways need to be fitted with ETCS Level 2 equipment. The trains needed this anyway for the Heathrow tunnels, and therefore the obvious thing to have done would have been to install it in the long tunnels under London.
However, the Crossrail team reckoned (quite rightly as it turned out) that ETCS Level 2 would not be sufficiently developed to be deployed in the tunnels because, while it has been developed sufficiently to operate well on several railways in Europe, the level of sophistication required in the tunnels was far greater.
There, they needed to be equipped with an ATO (Automatic Train Operation) system, which means the trains can be controlled by computers with no one in the cab actually driving the trains, and also have the capability for ‘auto reversing’ which will allow drivers to go from one cab to the other at Paddington while the train automatically moves itself from the westbound track to the eastbound one.
Therefore, they chose a well-used system called CBTC (Communications-based train
“It was clear for some time that the Queen had better find something else to do on December 9, the day earmarked for several years as the day when Londoners would get their amazing new railway.”
control) to control the train in the tunnels. Again, the team thought it would be too complicated to use either ETCS Level 2 or CBTC in the mixed railway outside the tunnels, and too expensive to fit all the other trains with that equipment to make them all compatible. That is why there are three signalling systems on the Class 345s, and inevitably that has led to delays.
Apart from complexity, the other issue is the ‘unknown unknowns’ which were bound to arise from the huge number of interfaces between the various systems. For example, because the Bombardier trains were smaller than expected, the ventilation fans in several stations had to be increased in size. The trains had been expected to do more of the ventilation, but their reduced size meant that they pushed along less air and consequently the fans had to do more work. It is that type of knock-on effect of making a change which is very difficult to predict.
The implication of the delay for Transport for London is far more serious. TfL is incredibly cash-strapped at the moment, partly because it is being squeezed by the Government and partly because London Mayor Sadiq Khan made the mistake of promising no fare increases (or at least those under his control) during his four-year tenure.
Given there was already a Conservative government when he was elected, this was a step too far, but he thought it necessary in order to win (in the event, his large margin of victory meant that he would have won anyway). TfL is now facing having to make cuts in bus services, and its Underground investment programme may also be postponed. The delay to Crossrail will only exacerbate its difficulties.
The big question is: when will the railway open? According to Crossrail, there is still a bit of fitting out to do as “the remaining rail infrastructure works are due to complete this year. This ranges from removal of temporary services to completing the remaining installation of the permanent lighting and drainage pumps in the tunnels.”
Therefore, “by the end of the year, construction schedule will no longer impact testing, thereby allowing full testing to commence”.
The implication is that Crossrail has built in lots of time into the schedule to make sure that there are no further delays. Provided there are no more pesky unknown unknowns, it seems that Londoners will have their railway by the end of next year… and all these delays and cost overruns will quickly be forgotten. At the end of the day, this is not (as Andrew Adonis put it) a “disaster”, merely a blip.