I never thought too much about crossrail before it opened unless there was some disruption that it caused. I’ve always supported mass transit projects but as I wasn’t really the target audience it never caught my imagination. I’ve now tried the Elizabeth line and I’m so glad it was delivered. It’s staggering how big and beautiful the stations are. I remember thinking that this is probably what it would be like to live in subterranean cities on mars.
The platform size / train length is a bit mind blowing. Coming in to Liverpool Street from the east - if you're at the back of the train you're in position to get off at Liverpool St. If you're at the front you're getting off at Moorgate! Crazy!
It is a nice development, but I will air a gripe here that TfL seems to go to lengths to obscure the average traveler's understanding that you can take Elizabeth line to the airport and save $$.
The departure boards [edit: at Paddington rail station (note, not the tube)] will not label Elizabeth line trains with "Heathrow Airport", the TfL journey planner will not offer it to you unless you actively turn off National Rail options (i.e. Heathrow Express), etc.
This goes all the way back to when it was Heathrow Connect (does anyone remember that? Memories from my grad school days when it was approx. £6), and the fact that it was a continuing service to Heathrow always labeled as a small footnote near the bottom.
I somewhat wonder if they do this out of agreement with Heathrow Express, or more charitably interpreted as not confusing people. Either way it costs people who don't know otherwise.
It’s possibly at least partly a case of journey planners assuming you want the fastest possible option, and not taking into account the premium Heathrow Express charges?
I’m not sure why TfL would want to actively push Heathrow Express over their own options, as they don’t have anything to gain, as it’s run by the airport and GWR / First Group, not themselves.
Apologies, my comments are from the time when the Elizabeth line was at the rail station at Paddington. And probably still hold for the few departures that do go from there. I'm not referring to the departure boards on the proper Elizabeth line now -- those of course show the destination.
My comment about the TfL journey planner is still the case though.
I’m excited there’s now a reasonably priced way to get from central London to Heathrow, without advance booking. On may way out last week I had to do the change at Paddington. Really looking forward to going straight to Tottenham Court Road from T4 on one go!
You know it isn't reasonably priced... It's still got a special airport surcharge of a whopping £12.80 each way, and still costs more than an airport transfer at pretty much every other European capital city.
According to citymapper crossrail shaves off a whole 7 minutes from my journey while costing £7 more. I'll probably keep taking the piccadilly unless I'm like, desperate for aircon or really late or something.
I've done that a few times with my Strida (admittedly checked rather than overhead compartment). You'd probably get away with bringing a Brompton as hand luggage, although it's technically slightly over the limit.
If only the US would make major investments in regional rail like this, instead of either doing nothing or harrumphing that commuter rail should be run the way it has been run for the past 100 years.
Infrastructure in the U.S. is broken in terms of how it is supposed to be delivered these days. The unfortunate side effect of the freeway revolts of the 1960s putting a nail in grade separated vehicular right of ways in urban areas is that these same legal arguments and protections are now leveled against grade separated transit ways in urban areas by moneyed groups that argue in bad faith. Transit agencies now spend time planning and developing alternative options that are suboptimal, knowing full well 5/6 of these will be wasted efforts and only one will be chosen, just to give these busybodies some semblance of control of large scale engineering projects they aren't qualified to understand.
You should read up all of the drama surrounding the purple line and the eventual sepulveda transit line in la. The issue: subway tunnel boring under a rich neighborhood. Fireworks ensue along with broken understandings of physics and geology but in the end, people used nonscientific arguments to delay the purple line extension in LA for 20 years (1), and are trying to use these arguments to kill a subway line (2) that would bore under a mountain and in no way shape or form affect the complaining rich Bel Air community above it. Somehow you don't hear a peep from the people in the hollywood hills living above the redline subway tunnel, nor see any affect on their property values from having a train move several hundred feet below the parcel offered for sale. Everything takes more money and a lot more time than it should to do anything at all, compared in years previous when people would generally see infrastructure and progress as a good thing.
Crossrail involved tunneling under some of the most expensive property in the world, while passing within inches of existing underground tunnels. There are several fascinating documentaries.
Sadly it's no longer on iPlayer in the UK but if you use a bit of search wizardry I'm sure you could find it.
The 15 Billon Pound Railway
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04b7h1w
Most Transport Agencies are basically just high way construction offices. That is basically why they were created, or at least when state level DoT became massive, to construct highway.
They can build an mind glowingly insane 7 level loop clover with integrated rocket launcher and helipad but they couldn't design a safe and efficient pedestrian crossing if it smacked them in the face.
They are still planning new highways right threw actual real existing cities as if they were Robert Moses. Its literal insanity.
This is only part of the problem, though it is a factor. See https://transitcosts.com/overview/ (which won't be online for a few more weeks - I was able to read a couple pages a few weeks ago before they took it offline, and it looks very detailed)
In my collection of things I have a NYC Subway Map* from 2017. This one is special because it was commemorating the "opening of the second avenue subway". At the bottom corner in big fat font is the signature of then Governor Andrew Cuomo. For those unaware, the second avenue subway has been planned since the 1930s. In 2017 they opened phase 1, which consisted of 3 new stations stretching from 63rd St to 96th St. Maybe sometime this century phase 2 and 3 will open. I for one am not optimistic.
Its not for lack of investment that this project has been delayed over 100 years. Plenty of money has gone down that pit. There is a cost disease afflicting infrastructure in the US (and health care, and education).
*technically what I have is a transit diagram, not a map. The difference being it abstracts away the geography and angularizes all the lines.
When the US needs to build infrastructure, they can build it incredibly fast. The replacement I-35 bridge [34] and the fix to the Oroville Dam Spillway [6] are examples.
The ADA messed up by not specifying allowed existing buildings have to have a 30 year plan in place to become accessible, with a requirement that if they put this off they place into escrow that years part. (I'm not sure how to write this, but essentially either upgrade 1/30 of your buildings each year, or place in third partt escrow that money). If you own a building you need to do a major remodel every 30 years anyway just to keep it safe and in good shape so for landlords keeping their property up this isn't really much different than what they would do anyway)
I mean, there are definitely stations that the MTA has not rehabbed in the last 30 years. There’s also no realistic plan to renovate every station either. (And they do need it, many stations have water damage and the like)
I imagine that could only happen in a few areas of the East Coast, and maybe one on the West Coast. There aren't many regions of the US with density comparable to the UK (FWIW, UK is smaller than Oregon and has 16x the number of people).
Aren’t there a couple dozen countries in the world with high speed rail? How do we compare to Spain?
Let me save you some time Because we’ve been over this 1000 times… There are plenty of places in the United States with similar population densities as Spain, for example
The US from the east coast to a bit west of the Mississippi, and the west coast are plenty dense. The plains, Rocky mountains, and Alaska really bring down our population density, but if you take those large areas with few people away we have plenty or density.
Tories are absolutely itching to cancel HS2 at the point just after all the money has been spent and disruption incurred, but before the benefits can be realized. It's like the cancellation of the UK's space programme at the exact moment they were about to do their first (and in the end only) launch. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Arrow
Not really the ‘tories’ just some of them. The northern Tory MPs certainly want it. It is funded by long dated bonds. Not immediate taxation as it’s a nationally significant capital project. So cancelling bits of it looks good on paper only but makes zero immediate impact.
As a Return on investment, every pound spent in the south east on infrastructure returns 5 times or more in the local economy compared to the rest of the Uk, which is how these projects are prioritised.
One would think that there would be diminishing returns to more infrastructure in London, that some investment in the Power House North would do wonders.
A high speed rail linking up Liverpool to Hull sounds like a good idea, there are the Penniness to drill though, but it would hardly be the Gotthard base tunnel would it.
Pennine base tunnel anyone?
[update: this turns out to be a study for a road tunnel]
Those gains are part of the reason HS2 should go all the way to Scotland and why the Northern Powerhouse route from Hull to Liverpool should be built too
Its pretty terrible, that line would have had a major capacity impact on all the other Eastern lines. It goes a long way destroying the major benefits of HS2.
> One would think that there would be diminishing returns to more infrastructure in London, that some investment in the Power House North would do wonders.
Why would one think that? Everything we see suggests returns are compounding rather than diminishing.
Generally I agree with you, but with recent political developments I'm wondering if Sunak might be forced into reversing some of that thinking in an attempt to win more votes in the North for when ever the next general election happens...
Not that I'd be optimistic if I lived up north, but maybe a bit more hopeful that with previous Tory lies about wanting to level up any part of the country.
Considering the not so great outlook for the Tories at the next election (although there’s probably two years to go to the next election and a lot can happen etc etc), they might consider writing off the North to focus on a “blue wall” in the South to minimise losses, which might not bode well for Northern investment.
It really is a very well-implemented project. I also went for a ride on the first train through the tunnels on Sunday, and the impact it's going to have on a lot of journeys across London was pretty clear.
It's not absolutely perfect. The absence of step-free boarding at the stations shared with National Rail infrastructure is unfortunate, and some of the interchanges with other lines involve annoyingly long paths. But these are compromises and I really hope some of them can be rectified in the future. But the design of the stations, the lighting, the trains… just all absolutely first-rate.
As someone who lives west, the wait coming into Paddington is really annoying. It's definitely worse so far, compared to previously when you zoomed straight in and then changed. Hopefully they make things line up a bit better. My station only gets 4 trains an hour so there's still going to be lots of waiting around at Paddington on the way home also. It is great in the central section though, a really nice job on the platforms etc. And actually the upgrade to step free stations on the western section is good. Although their idea of "step free" is questionable, the gap is huge!!
The delays are until May AFAIK, the main National Rail timetables only have major changes a couple of times a year, but they want the through connection to Crossrail open ASAP, so have an inelegant kludge of trains waiting outside Paddington to sync up the Crossrail core and NR timetables until then.
If you are into video-form content, you might also enjoy Jago Hazzard's YouTube channel. Here's a random pick - a video about why the Mithcham Tram Stop might have a valid claim to being the oldest railway station in London: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKJqY4e5xrk
What about the writing is entertaining? Not trying to be dismissive. I found the writing style authentic, factual, a very reporter-style writing. I did not find anything particularly entertaining. What am I missing?
And "Excitable folk continued to walk up and down the train, including one in full purple fleece and joggers with an Elizabeth line bag round his neck. I can't see his look catching on." Lovely dry British understatement.
I smiled at "People Who Like Trains were very much in evidence" given that I watched Geoff Marshall's video "Through Running Starts on the Elizabeth Line" at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXJQQ7YQ3gw on the new changes.
Marshall is very much a Person Who Likes Trains, and in the video he talks with others of that ilk.
If you are cleaver you can put the top on and then dig things out under. Lots of weird and hard to explain variations like thus exist that are just as cheap as digging and then putting a top on. But instead everyone wants to go for expensive tunnels first despite not being needed.
We really should do more elevated rail, which is a lot cheaper than digging.
You can't dig up the area around Bond street and close down existing tube services during construction. (The crossrail tunnels run under some existing lines.)
Theoretically possible in the sense that the lines exist and are connected? I don't know for sure, and while it may be a very convoluted route, I wouldn't be surprised.
EDIT: This map[1] suggests you could do Norwich -> Birmingham New Street -> Bristol Temple Meads. Without having to go through London, I suspect this is indeed possible without changing trains, even if no operator runs that route.
Theoretically: Absolutely - If Norwich has the same type of electrification as the Great Western Main Line. The Class 345 trains that run in the Elizabeth Line, have the signalling for the Great Western Main Line, Crossrail Core & Great Eastern Main Line.
In practice, no - different train companies operate all 3 lines
Currently the Elizabeth Line trains are slow and stop everywhere. Think of tube rather than train.
From the West end of the line in Reading nobody takes the Elizabeth Line to go into London, for instance, it's much too slow compared to the direct fast GWR trains.
This also means that the line probably cannot be shared with fast trains for direct routes from East to West, I think.
I live near Ealing and it's been a tremendous improvement to my commute.
You're correct, fast intercity services and the stopping crossrail services likely cannot coexist.
But technically it is possible, assuming the requisite signalling standards are met by the rolling stock intended to be used. It's possible that only the Class 345 and Thameslink's Class 700's can meet this requirement currently.
The train companies operate trains, not lines. For example; CrossCountry’s service runs on track shared with other passenger companies and freight from Penzance up to Scotland.
The train companies (in general) operate a franchise for a particular region of the railway (including mandatory service to less profitable areas in the network). CrossCountry is a quirk in that it operates the "Cross Country" franchise and it has no specific track to itself. Eurostar, Grand Central and Heathrow Express are Open Access operators in that they have no franchise of their own but pay to use the track for each journey. The whole thing is needlessly complicated to be honest, there's no real exclusivity - but there's massive capital costs involved in setting up a competitor and more risk involved for these Open Access operators.
Great Western Railway operates the Great Western franchise which incorporates much of south wales and south west of england - Including the Great western mainline. Abellio Greater Anglia operates most services on the Great Eastern Mainline
As for permissions I don't know if the crossrail core section has exclusivity granted to TFL (or its subcontractor MTR Corporation), given it's run as a concession this may be the case.
It would, but it would be unwise. A commuter/metro service has quite different needs from a long-distance service (this is one of the lessons of Thameslink, which does work that way, with trains running from Brighton to Peterborough through central London, and attendant compromises). The Crossrail plan is to divert the commuter services through the tunnel and free up more space in the terminals (Liverpool Street and Paddington) for the fast long-distance trains.
Bring on HS2 next!