13 December 2018
Silent Night
Technology stuck in shed
by J.R. Thomas
It was winter in London and deep underground there was a rumbling and a rattling; could it be an oncoming train?
Well, no it couldn’t. Not on the Elizabeth line anyway, or Crossrail as it is better known, and given what is going on, a nickname that is likely to stick. For Crossrail is making lots of people very cross indeed. Crossrail was supposed to open in spring 2017, revised a couple of years ago to spring 2018, then December 2018, and a couple of weeks ago to December 2019. Now that opening date has been brought forward to…, no, just joking. Transport for London, TfL has issued its latest target – no opening date at all; not one that anybody will sign up to, anyway.
Readers of our Lens on the News section last week may have noticed in the Business Section the “resignation” of Sir Terry Morgan. This has been one of the stranger resignations of the public sector; Sir Terry has been saying for some time in private, and then confirmed his private mutterings in public, that he expected to be sacked from his job as chairman of Crossrail, a job he has had since 2009. Four months ago Morgan was also appointed chairman of HS2, another major railway project which is making very little progress from Euston to Birmingham and points north. Chris Grayling, the transport minister, said this was to get HS2 back on track and to bring in some drive and motivation.
Sir Terry is one of Britain’s most distinguished engineers, a man who has made his way from modest beginnings (his grandfather was a Welsh miner) to lead a number of major projects, and at the age of 70 is still a serious force. He is also a man rather inclined to say it as it is (hence his amused briefings about his approaching sacking) and, allegedly, has been saying it as it is for some time to Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London. Morgan says he told Khan in July this year that Crossrail would be delayed and overbudget; Khan says Morgan didn’t. Whoever said what to whom, and whoever left those conversations understanding what, may never be entirely clear, but Morgan is not noted for holding back. And Khan has major problems in TfL which is likely to lose a billion pounds this year, against a budget to break even. The last thing TfL needs is to have to find more money to finish its new east-west high-profile project, and indeed earlier in the summer it was bailed out by the government to the tune of £300m, supposedly to get the thing finished and open. Mr Grayling made various noises about getting it finished and the government’s commitment to improving public transport. He also says he did not know the scale of the problem, and maybe he didn’t, given he had handed Sir T another high profile job, the mess that is HS2, not long before. As is said in sports commentary, they know now.
Investigative accountants, KPMG, were told to have a quick look at the finances of the project and come up with something reliable. It has been a very quick look but has produced a figure to work towards – £1.7bn should see the trains rolling, they say. That’s on top of that £300m already added to the pot. Oh dear, you might groan; where can they possibly find that? No problem; from you of course. The Department of Transport will lend TfL £1.3bn, and the odd £400m will be covered from somewhere – sponsored walks or jumble sales perhaps, or more likely, from further scrapings from TfL’s already bust budget. And how will it all be paid back? Psssaah, moving on…
So Londoners are going to have to struggle and strive to get to work for a while longer yet. Not really. Crossrail is pretty much a vanity project anyway. It runs from Liverpool Street station to Paddington; at both ends it comes to the surface and then runs out on the overground commuter lines to Reading in the west and Shenfield in the east. In central London, where the tunnelling has been going on and where some very lavish new stations have been built at huge cost and with enormous above ground disruption, it parallels two other underground rail links, the Circle line and the Central line. Indeed, it also traces the route of the Circle and District lines to the south – it is not difficult to get from the City to Chelsea, Heathrow, and Paddington, with more choices than to almost any other London destinations.
The City is the clue to this strange addition to an already well served market. There had been mutterings about building a high speed limited stop line east to west across London as early as 1941, as planners started to look at post-war reconstruction planning. The trouble was, nobody could make any sort of case for financial viability, and the greater need was seen to be a south-west north-east link (nothing changes). But give a planner an idea and like a dog with a mutton bone, they are not easily parted. Finally, at the turn of the century, the City of London Corporation decided to take the project onto its broad and relatively rich shoulders and not only gave the concept some political clout, but also some hard cash, courtesy of the City ratepayers. Some joked that the idea was to get busy businessmen from Heathrow to the City in record time, with opportunities for a lunching or shopping break at Bond Street. The same time saving, if not more, would have been achieved by speeding up immigration procedures at Heathrow Airport, and how many City highfliers do you see on public transport anyway, but never mind, it would be good for the booming financial services sector. This got the project its Parliamentary approval in 2008 and construction began in 2009. So here we are, two years late, and over budget and no end date yet in sight. The City Corporation has gone a little quiet on the subject.
In among all the farrago of blame and blast, accusation and counter accusation, nobody has actually said what the problem is. After all the tunnels are built, the rails are laid, the stations are open for the connecting lines, and the new trains – for there are special trains for this special project – are not only built, they are running on the eastern overground part of the route. But it is the trains, apparently, that actually are the problem. Railway men love new technology and on this train superhighway only the best will do, designed to run under a new state of the art signalling system and one which of course has to be compatible with the systems at either end. These are, almost needless to say, different – we said railwaymen like innovation, not standardisation. That should not be a problem – Thameslink, which runs south-north had the same problem and indeed different power supplies, but used low tech solutions. Crossrail wanted state of the art and got it. The trouble is, it doesn’t work and will need those billions more to get it to do so.
But the Shaw Sheet never likes to be negative. There is a solution. Notice the swarms of cyclists now in London’s streets? Give them a dry safe separated cross-London link, out of harm’s way beneath Londoners feet. We know just the place…
