Elizabeth Line opens
Ten years after tunnelling began, and more than three years after it was due to open, the new main line under central London is finally open for business.
LONDON’s much delayed Elizabeth Line (Crossrail) opened on May 24, with trains planned to run every five minutes from 06.30 to 23.00 between Paddington and Abbey Wood.
Transport for London says that opening the new tunnel section under central London will transform travel across the capital and the South
East by “improving transport links, cutting journey times, providing additional capacity, and transforming accessibility with new stations and walkthrough trains.”
It will operate initially in three separate parts from Reading/Heathrow-Paddington (main line), Paddington (Elizabeth Line)-Abbey
Wood, and Liverpool Street (main line)-Shenfield, but the current TfL Rail services west of Paddington and east of Liverpool Street will be rebranded as Elizabeth Line when the central section opens.
The plan is for a full service of through trains to be introduced from this autumn once further testing and software updates have been completed, at which point the peak frequency through the central section will be increased to 22 trains per hour in between Paddington and Whitechapel.
There are eight new underground stations in the central section at Paddington, Bond Street, Tottenham Court Road, Farringdon, Liverpool Street, Whitechapel, Canary Wharf and Woolwich; plus two overground at Custom House and Abbey Wood. Delays at Bond Street meant it would not be ready in time for the May 24 opening, and trains will not stop there until later in the year.
All Elizabeth Line stations will be staffed from the first to the last train, with step-free access from street to train at stations between Paddington and Woolwich, and manual ramps available at Abbey Wood.
Ten-year build
Over the last decade, the Crossrail project has been Europe’s largest construction scheme, although the idea for a cross-London underground main line between Paddington and Liverpool Street dates back to the 1940s.
The term ‘Crossrail’ was first used in a 1974 rail study by the Department of the Environment and the Greater London Council, but it was not until 2005 that a Bill was put before Parliament to build such a scheme, which gained Royal Assent as the Crossrail Act in 2008.
Construction of the station box plus associated office and retail development at Canary Wharf began in 2009. But it was not until May 2012 that tunnelling got underway at the Royal Oak portal, just to the west of Paddington where the route leaves the Great Western Main Line for the 10-mile journey under the capital.
The final tunnelling breakthrough occurred at Farringdon on May 23, 2015 when Tunnel Boring Machine (TBM) Victoria arrived from Limmo Peninsula, near Canning Town in east London.
The TBM then moved forward into the station box to add the final tunnel rings behind it, which was completed on
May 26.
A total of 26 miles of new tunnel have been built, for which the TBMs excavated about 3.4 million tonnes of material, nearly all of which has been reused – most notably, three million tonnes were shipped to Wallasea Island in the Thames estuary to help to create a wetland nature reserve. The tunnels are deepest at Finsbury Circus, near Liverpool Street, where they are 42 metres below ground.
Track laying was completed in September 2017, then the south east section was energised in February 2018, followed by Westbourne Park to Stepney in May 2018.
Targets and delays
Crossrail was renamed Elizabeth Line in February 2016, and services through the central section were due to start running from the end of 2018, with a full service between Reading/Heathrow and Shenfield/Abbey Wood following in December 2019. Prior to this, stopping services between Liverpool Street (main line) and Shenfield were transferred to TfL Rail in May 2015, followed by the former Heathrow Connect stopping service to Paddington (main line) in May 2018, and Reading to Paddington following in December 2019.
By then, however, major problems had developed and
TfL announced in August 2018 that the full line would not open before autumn 2019.
April 2019 saw this put back further to the end of 2020, putting it two years behind the initial schedule, before
July 2019 saw it put back even further to ‘sometime in 2021’. Finally, in August 2020, TfL said that the central section would be ready in the first half of 2022.
There had been ‘major challenges’ in writing and testing the software that would integrate the train with three different track signalling systems, as well as delays installing equipment inside the tunnels. However, trial running through the tunnels began in May 2021, and early 2022 saw mass testing of loading/unloading at stations and emergency evacuations in tunnels using volunteer ‘passengers’.
The delays meant the budget soared from the 2018 figure of £14.8 billion to £18.7 billion at the end of 2020. However, before the coronavirus pandemic, TfL expected the new line to generate
£500 million in its first year, rising to £1 billion a year from 2024/25.
The fleet
Elizabeth Line services are operated by Class 345 EMUs built by Bombardier (now Alstom) in Derby. Seventy nine-car trains (Nos. 345001070) were ordered at a cost of more than £1 billion – although delays to the start of the full service meant many have spent long periods in store. All are based at a purpose-built depot at Old Oak Common, to the west of Paddington, with additional servicing in East London at Ilford.
Bombardier won the contract to build them in February 2014 and the first entered service out of Liverpool Street in June 2017 – initially as a seven-car formation until work to extend platforms there was completed in 2021. Trains on the western route out of Paddington were also delivered as seven-car sets, but have since been converted to nine-car units.
A full nine-car set can carry 1500 passengers, with 450 seated, at a top speed of 90mph.