In London, a ‘game-changer’ railway line gets ready to roll
LONDON — Andy Byford points out the cathedral-like ceiling, the crystal-clear acoustics, the “pureness of the aesthetic” that surrounds him.
The head of London’s public transport system is rhapsodizing about a subway station — part of a new line he says will be “the envy of the world.”
“It really gives people a sense of grandeur, but there is also a sense of calm,” said Byford as he showed journalists around Liverpool Street Station on London’s gleaming new east-west Elizabeth Line, due to open on May 24.
The $23 billion mixed overground and underground railway, named in honor of Queen Elizabeth II, is3½ years late and $5 billion over budget. But Byford says it will be “a game-changer” for Britain’s pandemic-scarred capital city.
“I think when it opens it is going to be a huge morale boost for London, postCOVID,” said Byford. “What could be a greater symbol of London’s emergence from COVID than this spectacular railway?”
Yet there’s a question as to whether London still needs the Elizabeth Line. Since ground was first broken on the project — also known as Crossrail — in 2009, London has been through recession, a rocky British exit from the European Union and a coronavirus pandemic that shut down the city for months and transformed work and travel patterns, potentially for good.
Tony Travers, a professor of government at the London School of Economics, said the Elizabeth Line “is a remarkable and beautiful thing.”
“But it was built — after a lot of effort and over a very long period of time — for a different economy,” he said.
“Its entire economic case was very heavily predicated on the continued growth of the economy of central London.”
Britain’s biggest infrastructure project in decades involved digging 26 miles of new tunnels under Europe’s biggest city — uncovering mammoth bones, Roman ruins and the skeletons of medieval plague victims along the way.
It was scheduled to open in late 2018. But with just months to go the launch was postponed, and then postponed again as workers struggled to finish 10 new stations and link up three separate signaling systems on the western, central and eastern stretches of the 60-mile railway.
In 2020, the builders turned to Byford, a veteran public transport executive who ran the Toronto Transit Commission and then the transit authority in New York, where he was nicknamed “Train Daddy” as he grappled with the Big Apple’s often frustrating subway and bus systems.
Byford has staked his reputation on getting the Elizabeth Line up and running.
“It’s had its challenges,” he acknowledged. “This has been a labor of love for us.
We’ve sweated blood over this thing.”
The largely underground central section from Paddington Station in west London to Abbey Wood in the southeast opens to paying customers this month, days before the U.K. celebrates the queen’s Platinum Jubilee, though it won’t be fully integrated with the aboveground eastern and western legs until the fall.
The Elizabeth Line opens in a city, and country, facing economic uncertainty, with the war in Ukraine fueling record inflation and the city center still quieter than before the pandemic as many officers work at least part time from home.
The line’s expected ridership has been scaled back from a predicted 250 million people a year before the pandemic, to about 200 million a year, though Crossrail chief executive Mark Wild is certain the new line will help get London back on track.
“If there’s ever going to be a railway that’s pandemic-proof, it’s this one,” Wild said. “It’s airy, fast, the stations are cathedral-like, the air’s fresh. It’s modern, clean. If there’s ever a railway that can stimulate a return to the office, it’s going to be this one.”