please empty your brain below
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And with increased working from home, will it turn out to be a white elephant? One hopes that in two years the situation will be back to normal, but you never know.
Malcolm | 22.08.20 - 7:46 a.m. | #
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Whenever I hear 'Crosrail delay' on the news now I automatically think, "That's DG's post for tomorrow sorted then!"
Blue Witch | 22.08.20 - 8:00 a.m. | #
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I’m working on a project now that was meant to deliver in 12 months (July 2019). If we’re lucky we might get the first pieces out in November!
In July last year we thought November 2019 was still possible....
I feel for the Crossrail team...
Southern Heights (Light Railway) | 22.08.20 - 8:02 a.m. | #
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If we were to be asked again, about which type of line Crossrail 2 we'd like, would we be more likely to choose a simpler alternative which would be less likely to go wrong?
Alex McKenna | 22.08.20 - 8:07 a.m. | #
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The Crossrail delays are not great, but pretty much all large infrastructure projects overrun - once live we rapidly forget this. The Victoria Line (a smaller project with less technical innovation) was a year late in opening throughout, for instance.
Steve | 22.08.20 - 8:36 a.m. | #
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Well, on the plus side, if and when Crossrail is ever completed, it will be a textbook example of poor project management from which others could learn. (Though I suspect not many will.)
Tim W | 22.08.20 - 8:39 a.m. | #
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It feels like Crossrail and the PM's COVID-19 response are battling it out for the title of "The National Embarrassment". I for one can't wait to try out The National Embarrassment... if it ever opens, that is.
TheLupineOne | 22.08.20 - 8:49 a.m. | #
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People underestimate how long non-machine tasks take, tunnel and track laying were all repeatable processes that a machine could do, obviously there were people, but they were doing repeatable tasks as well - so they got quicker, all the other tasks were one off things done by humans, yes they had machines, but each task was still a one off non repeatable one.
This happens with all non standard tasks, so a plumber/gas fitter/electrician will spend a lot of their time just figuring out where stuff goes, instead of just doing the job, the easiest option of doing the 'Richard Rogers' doesn't find favour with property owners, so time is wasted making holes in walls and pulling up floor boards etc.
Still Anon | 22.08.20 - 8:52 a.m. | #
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As has been said, projects are often delayed. The issue seems to be-among others-that you have two signalling systems- East- and West- having to work with the third in the tunnels.
And getting the three of them to work together has been a major sticking point. Additionally the design for Bond Street had to change halfway through, adding complications.
There was an excellent London Reconnections article regarding the issues, worth a read.
Jonathan | 22.08.20 - 8:54 a.m. | #
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Berlin Brandenburg airport was originally scheduled to be operational in 2011. I think they are now hoping to start operations later this year.
jack hopkins | 22.08.20 - 9:04 a.m. | #
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You can for the conspiracy theory or the incompetence theory. I will suggest the latter in this case.
Andrew | Homepage | 22.08.20 - 9:40 a.m. | #
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One of the major problems is that to get the contract in the first place, many companies under bid and totally ignore all potential problems in their time line forecast. This all means that the basis of the project was not sound, you can only expect it to get worse, and it does without fail.
Michael | 22.08.20 - 9:58 a.m. | #
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Not all big infrastructure projects fall behind schedule - some incredibly complex ones have been brought in within budget and schedule. Where such projects fall behind is either a) because of unknown issues which only arise during construction or b) because of poor governance and management.
Crossrail is clearly the latter. The National Audit Office report into the project [pdf] highlighted the risks embedded in the style of project management adopted by Crossrail Ltd.
As per the report, "... The handover schedule ... was not a detailed, bottom-up plan that reflected the work remaining, set out the logical and most efficient sequencing of all remaining activities across individual contracts, and highlighted dependencies ... Crossrail Ltd's assumptions about the level of progress that was achievable bore little resemblance to the historic progress than contractors had made".
So while the company was publicly committed to the December 2018 handover date, it knew at the beginning of 2018 that "if all the Tier 1 contractors' programmes were simply added together the programme would end in 2020."
The project was clearly behind schedule as early as 2016 and yet the management team did not publicly disclose this or adjust timelines accordingly - they were so wedded to the December 2018 handover that they chose to ignore anything which presented a threat to that timeline.
So the project management team were clearly out-of-their-depth and had adopted a project management mechanism which they knew could not deliver the results as scheduled and yet chose not to public reveal that until the last possible moment - they chose to lie rather than accept that they had screwed up. The mess of their incompetence is still being cleared up.
What is even worse are the comments on p7 of the report that the Crossrail Ltd management team viewed themselves as "exceptional" capable of delivering "exceptional results"!
Will B | 22.08.20 - 10:17 a.m. | #
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Whilst it is easy to blame poor project management, a friend of mine in the construction industry said at the beginning of the project that the timescales looked heroic, particularly with the boom in building work going on in London sucking up a lot of the talent. He also said that the building industry wouldn't care as it means more work and money for them.
There are a lot of complex reasons why this project is late, but I would think by now they would have got a handle on it.
Jimbo | 22.08.20 - 10:32 a.m. | #
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My brother is in the construction industry and is constantly reminding me (latest e-mail came overnight) that he reckoned from the very beginning it would be 2023/4.
He doesn't know too much about rail construction per se but has always said the project management would be rubbish.
Chris | 22.08.20 - 10:38 a.m. | #
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The arrogance on display from TfL and Crossrail all the while the project appeared to be on target has rebounded massively. It is a textbook failure of project management. I am sure it will be wonderful when it opens but it has killed any chance of new public transport projects in London for a generation.
Ned | 22.08.20 - 11:55 a.m. | #
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One of the worst aspects of this omnishambles is that Crossrail "once got within 100 days of its official opening date".
That is delusion / lying on an epic scale.
ADS | Homepage | 22.08.20 - 12:15 p.m. | #
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Oh for the days when DG was fretting that Crossrail mightn't be open in time for the Olympics
Simon | Homepage | 22.08.20 - 12:21 p.m. | #
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I think one of the biggest problems with projects like this is that they run, there are lessons to learn, and then we don't do any similar projects for years to come. All the experience, all the knowledge, all the learning gets lost.
Imagining what could have happened if the Jubilee Line Extension team had moved onto Crossrail straight away. Then after that went onto Crossrail 2. We will never know but I reckon it would be a LOT smoother.
But we don't do that. We just go "well that was crap", shut everything down for years, and that's that. The experience, the knowledge is lost.
It's the same with rail electrification. Yes the Reading line had issues. But if that team had gone straight away into another electrification project, they would known the issues, the pitfalls. But no. It went wrong so shut it all down, come back to it again later, make all the same mistakes.
Things go wrong. We need to accept that. But lack of knowledge and experience can make these things much much worse.
Andrew Bowden | Homepage | 22.08.20 - 1:15 p.m. | #
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Anyone who has been involved in major projects (whatever discipline) looked at Crossrail in disbelief when one of their major milestones (transformer at Pudding Mill Lane) quite literally blew up (six months to fix) and yet no delivery milestone changed. How any project manager worth their salt could say the Pudding Mill Lane incident wouldn't delay things, and say it with a straight face, should never be employed again.
IslandDweller | 22.08.20 - 1:54 p.m. | #
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The way delays have been drip fed is a disgrace
It was bad enough that we got within a few months of opening before it was postponed, but even that first delay was for only a year. I am certain that someone back in 2018 must have had a realistic idea of how long the remaining tasks would take. If Bond Street 2 years on is still nowhere near finished, it must have been blindingly obvious even in 2017 that there was a major problem there, when its progress was compared to other central London stations.
Mikey C | 22.08.20 - 2:33 p.m. | #
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Andrew - it's not as if the JLE extension team all twiddled their thumbs for the next 15 years before Crossrail construction started, there have been plenty of other major projects in the meantime such as HS1, Heathrow T5 and the major Thameslink works especially the rebuild of London Bridge. Plus projects elsewhere in the country and overseas.
Mikey C | 22.08.20 - 2:39 p.m. | #
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We can now look back on all those TV documentaries showing the heroic work of the Crossrail teams, drilling and digging ever onward, and constructing increasingly dramatic structures to transport the people of London across... oops! Lies, all lies! But did the telegenic female senior engineer and the others featured know it was all a con, or were they kept in the dark as well?
ActonMan | 22.08.20 - 2:44 p.m. | #
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The @elizabethline Twitter account went very quiet after July 2018.
diamond geezer | Homepage | 22.08.20 - 2:46 p.m. | #
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Mikey C - I am sure the people who worked on it have been very busy over the years. But when you split teams up, you lose knowledge. You lose experience.
If the experience had been kept together, it would have been so much more valuable.
Andrew Bowden | Homepage | 22.08.20 - 2:53 p.m. | #
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I seem to recall at least one military project would, proportionally, be more relevant as textbook example. Nimrod AEW and RAF LITS (both well written up in journals and books), for example.
Crossrail is, proportionally, an also ran, I think, although significant ain absolute real money terms.
MilesT | 22.08.20 - 3:03 p.m. | #
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Well managed large scale projects exist: Marandi bridge in Genoa is a case of designing and completing a huge project swiftly and efficiently.
As an outside stakeholder involved in dozens, maybe hundreds, of meetings with Crossrail my abiding memory was that nobody had an overall understanding of the big picture with separate contracts muddling on with their own bit and sometimes getting in each others way. The Pudding Mill explosion should have been the first acknowledgement that 2018 was not possible instead of the constant BS "On time, on budget", neither statement which was ever true.
scrumpy | 22.08.20 - 3:33 p.m. | #
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Doesn't bear thinking about how long Crossrail 2 is going to take. To even get to the starting line is going to take best part of a decade according to forecasters.
Why do these infra projects in UK proceed at such a glacial pace? If it was an essential infra project in a war situation...
dg interrupts: ...but it's not.
Kevin | 22.08.20 - 5:35 p.m. | #
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I remember going down to the Canary Wharf Crossrail Place station platforms on a tour, 3 years ago next month, and everything looking broadly like it was almost complete. The platform doors had been installed across half of the station, it was PPE free for one half of the platform and the entirety of the public areas. DG did a post on it at the time.
I'd love to see how it compares now, to how it was 3 years ago.
R | 22.08.20 - 5:59 p.m. | #
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Disappointing though not completely unexpected news.
I do though wonder about the robustness of the Programme / Project governance and assurance environment for Crossrail, as it appears to have suffered from classic project management problems whereby short-term political imperatives were followed at the expense of a more realistic assessment as to the practicalities, costs and risks of such a major innovative undertaking. I wonder where was the rigour and discipline that independent business and technical programme / project assurance is supposed to provide i.e. the voice of realism and practicality to the understandable spin and optimism of developers and the sponsor?
When it is finally opened it will be a significant addition to the capitals transport infrastructure. But whether in the Covid / post-Covid world, the business case stacks up and predicted usage levels will be achieved to justify the costs involved, is a great unknown. But this is a question that will affect the sponsors and bankers / paymasters of many major projects (infrastructural, commercial, residential), as we enter the new economic landscape that Covid-19 has created.
IanD | 22.08.20 - 6:53 p.m. | #
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Endless verbiage about rigour, assurance, governance and robustness and was one of the reasons I was pleased to exit my last job.
(n.b. it wasn't Crossrail-related)
diamond geezer | Homepage | 22.08.20 - 7:10 p.m. | #
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A friend who’s been involved with the project for the last couple of years tells me that they employed external consultants to make sure that Crossrail management weren’t marking their own homework, but the consultants just took the money and told the management what they wanted to hear. Rather like auditors at financially compromised PLCs.
I take the point that other countries can mess things up too - add the new Stuttgart station to Berlin Brandenburg airport - but there must be a better way of doing these things...
Baldassaro | 22.08.20 - 7:12 p.m. | #
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Never mind, Crossrail may be open in time to allow London to host the 2036 Olympics.
Bob L-S | 22.08.20 - 9:15 p.m. | #
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More name calling - suggesting project managers were well practised liars - maybe you could do better as you are not employed.
Surbitonian | 22.08.20 - 9:36 p.m. | #
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I was employed and saw first hand Crossrail lying to the local community, especially the Public Relations manager. Not name calling - competence summary.
Scrumpy | 22.08.20 - 10:17 p.m. | #
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Hopefully this means an end to all those apologists who tediously point to historical delayed projects, or claim this is a good thing for health and safety purposes.
The delays are beyond belief and should bring shame upon all involved.
Bonnie Kelli | 22.08.20 - 11:59 p.m. | #
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Looking at how fast the Nightingale Hospitals went up, I'd suggest putting the army in charge to get things done.
Blue Witch | 23.08.20 - 8:10 a.m. | #
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Doesn't bode well for HS2...
Tigger | 23.08.20 - 11:24 a.m. | #
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In relation to Baldassaro's comments the external Project Representative reports highlighted many of the issues that the project was experiencing. Eg June 2018 report.
As with all such reports that rely on the goodwill of the organisation being reported on they are written in a classic English understated way. What it really means is that CRL has no chance what so ever of delivering on time and the approach of assuming remaining work can be compressed into the time available is ludicrous.
As for Tigger's comment - HS2 is already 3/4 years behind schedule.
arcturus | 23.08.20 - 11:55 a.m. | #
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The Nightingale Hospitals aren’t all that dissimilar to Crossrail actually. The basic bits were in place to schedule, but they would never have been able to open fully. They couldn’t get the staff without pulling them away from places where they were already more effectively deployed.
John | 23.08.20 - 10:22 p.m. | #
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Trial Running has finally begun today, 10th May 2021
diamond geezer | Homepage | 10.05.21 - 2:04 p.m. | #
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