Philip Haigh
The political row over Crossrail’s delay is overshadowing the fact that this is a massive project that needs time to be delivered right, argues PHILIP HAIGH
Crossrail: we need perspective.
IMAGINE you’re in a meeting about the progress of a flagship project. A slide comes up, explaining that this project has only a 10% chance of opening in May, a 50% chance of opening in June and an 85% chance for July.
A second slide explains that the team has examined options for partially opening in the December before, and neither are feasible.
That’s the meeting London Mayor Sadiq Khan attended on July 26 2018, about Crossrail. When the news broke in late August that London’s new east-west line would open a year late, in December 2019, the Mayor’s reaction was to claim that he hadn’t known about it.
A London Assembly committee meeting on September 6 quizzed him, and he said he only knew about the delay on August 29.
The same meeting asked questions of Crossrail’s chairman, its chief executive and London’s transport commissioner.
It heard that Crossrail’s board formally met on July 19, but Chairman Sir Terry Morgan (who has since quit) told the assembly committee that the board had only heard of concerns and that no dates were mentioned.
Yet the following day (July 20), Deputy London Mayor Heidi Alexander and Khan’s chief of staff attended a Crossrail briefing that contained slides with similar dates to those of July 26’s meeting - albeit without the probability figures - and a further slide that had the words ‘ not possible’ in red against a December 2018/January 2019 opening of the central (Stage 3) section under London.
Alexander later told the London Assembly’s transport committee on September 12: “Until the Crossrail Board met on August 29, the project was still advising us that there was a chance that the December opening date could be met, and so I did not hear anything - and nor did the Mayor - about an autumn opening date until the last week in August.”
Alexander may not have heard of the autumn opening date, but it’s hard to conclude anything other than she and the mayor knew (as much as anyone can know the future) that Crossrail would not open in December 2018.
When the mayor answered assembly members’ questions on October 19, he was asked about Crossrail’s delay.
Keith Prince asked whether he was aware of any potential delay at all. Khan replied: “No. One of the scenarios that we were given was probably some delay, but that was not a scenario that Crossrail Ltd envisaged would happen.”
Prince persisted and Khan reiterated: “Crossrail Ltd was not saying there was going to be a delay even in July 2018,” later adding, in response to further pushing: “The advice given to us by Crossrail up until August 2018, the end of August 2018, was the central section, according to them, was going to be ready by December 2018.”
Yet the slides Crossrail showed him said it was not feasible to open in December, and that even a July 2019 opening was not certain.
There’s little politicians love more than a good political row, and the mayor’s ill-advised and misleading denials have generated just such a row. Assembly Transport Committee Chairman Caroline Pidgeon said on December 3: “This ongoing situation is rapidly causing a loss in trust in the Mayor. If the Assembly was misled - that is a very serious breach of trust.”
She later issued a formal summons to the mayor, requiring him to attend a meeting on December 21 (after this issue of RAIL went to press), and said: “The transport committee and the public have put their trust in the mayor that there will be transparency during his administration, and he has a duty to make sure this is the case. However, in recent weeks and months it has become increasingly clear that when it comes to the Crossrail project he is
doing the opposite.”
Like many political rows, this one is pointless and one the mayor had no need to trigger. He could easily have said when news broke in August: “Yes, Crossrail briefed me in July and I asked them to explain what their alternative plan was.”
Instead, he looks like part of a cover-up for a project that is probably the railway industry’s most complex.
Many parts of it are running late. Bond Street station on the central section is behind schedule, and several meetings through the autumn heard that Crossrail did not have a train fit for testing in the central tunnels. Network Rail is running behind with its work on the western section, and Crossrail is behind the curve in completing the cabling and fire systems in the central tunnels, according to a slew of documents released in December.
As the since-departed chief executive Simon Wright told assembly members in September: “We have always known that it was complicated. It is an unprecedented scheme in terms of signalling. I do not want to bore people with the technology terribly much, but we have three separate systems - one in the centre, one in the east and potentially a different one in the west. It is very complicated with a train running across all three. It has to change from one to the other, at speed, at the interfaces [and] at the portals to the tunnels. It is very tough. We always knew it was going to be hard, and it has proven to be just that.
“The challenge that we have had in developing the various software systems, which need to come together and seamlessly work safely and reliably throughout, has been harder in terms of the time it has taken to get to this point.
“We started testing later than we would have ideally liked, as I explained. Those tests have not gone as well as we would have hoped, and therefore the progress made on the hundreds of tests that have to be concluded has been slower.”
Crossrail called in an independent reviewer and his September report, released on December 10, makes clear how much was still needed. Of the project’s plan for dynamic train testing he wrote that it equated “to the most optimistic schedule ever achieved”.
Yet Crossrail’s December 2018 opening date was always arbitrary. It’s not like the Jubilee Line Extension’s deadline of December 1999, to tie in with millennium celebrations in the dome at Greenwich. Had Crossrail set December 2019, then no one would have batted an eyelid.
That’s not to say that projects should overrun their budgets or timelines, but Crossrail’s delay needs a sense of perspective. In a decade’s time, will people be complaining that it opened a year late? I suspect not, just as no West Coast Main Line passengers comment that British Rail had to suspend its original electrification plans in the face of rising costs.
What shouldn’t be forgotten from Crossrail’s construction is the lessons of how to manage such a complex project that cuts across many different disciplines. It reinforces just how hard it is to integrate increasingly complicated trains with just as complicated signalling. No longer does signalling sit simply on and around the track with a driver to interpret it and control the train accordingly.
It shows just how difficult it is to complete tasks that sound simple but are on a grand scale. The independent review noted that when it came to lighting in the tunnels, Crossrail needed to install 3,810 luminaires to meet a particular deadline at a rate of 423 a week. At the time of the review, the average rate of the previous five weeks had been 150 a week. Assign more staff to the task (which the contractor planned to do) and the rate could rise, but if they’re doing this then does another task suffer?
Britain’s next massive railway project is High Speed 2. It has many similarities with Crossrail. There are the tunnels and the construction of new lines and stations, and there’s also the alterations to Network Rail’s tracks.
HS2’s engineers will need to integrate new trains with different signalling systems. Depending on who wins the rolling stock contract, these trains could come from a manufacturer with little UK experience. This is risky when you consider that Crossrail’s trains come from Bombardier in Derby and the signalling comes from Siemens.
Both are companies with a long presence in Britain and experience of its railways. However, what they are trying to do hasn’t been done before, despite Crossrail’s claim when it awarded Siemens the contract in 2012 that its train control system was “technically and operationally proven and is successfully used by many metro systems around the world”.
I hope Crossrail meets its deadlines. It will have a busy year pulling its various parts into a working railway that is ready to welcome thousands of passengers every day. But let’s dismiss the political row for what it is, and let Crossrail deliver.
“Crossrail’s December 2018 opening date was always arbitrary. It’s not like the Jubilee Line Extension’s deadline of December 1999, to tie in with millennium celebrations in the dome at Greenwich. Had Crossrail set December 2019, then no one would have batted an eyelid.”