please empty your brain below
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To quote a Boston billboard referring to the Boston Big Dig.
"Rome wasn't built in a day. If it was, we would have hired its contractors."
Julian Bond | Homepage | 04.07.14 - 7:52 a.m. | #
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I wonder what the projected opening date was in the 1993 plans?
martin | 04.07.14 - 7:58 a.m. | #
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I have to say, I care less about when Crossrail is finished than about when the surface disruption is finished. When does the eastern end of Oxford St stop being a building site?
Julian Bond | Homepage | 04.07.14 - 9:30 a.m. | #
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I have to say, I care less about when Crossrail is finished than about when the surface disruption is finished. When does the eastern end of Oxford St stop being a building site?
Julian Bond | Homepage | 04.07.14 - 9:30 a.m. | #
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To be fair the dates have remained stable for a number of years and everything seems to be on schedule.
I wouldn't be so cynical about Crossrail 2. With London's population recognised as expanding fast and lessons learnt about how to at least partially fund megaprojects like this (which was always the problem in the past) and general enthusiasm all round I see this as a real possibility. This comes from someone who generally looks at rail project schedules and thinks "Oh, yeah".
Undoubtedly Simon Jenkins will write a piece for the Evening Standard sooner or later telling us that Crossrail 2 is unnecessary and all we have to do is upgrade our existing infrastructure.
Pedantic of Purley | 04.07.14 - 9:31 a.m. | #
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It's important to note that the '24 trains an hour' headline service will in fact most likely be considerably lower throughout the day, and that figure will only be hit at peak times.
dave | 04.07.14 - 9:38 a.m. | #
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There's something about big rail projects and target dates. I well remember the heady days in the 1990s, when there were project teams involved in something called Thameslink 2000. It all sounded so exciting then. Well it's 2014 now and the embarrassing date appendage has been dropped. But at least the Thameslink trains are now being built.
Or you can err the other way and quote a date so far into the future that it might just be achievable. On yesterday's news, there was the breaking announcement that the Dawlish sea wall was to be bypassed by up to 5 variants of a new line between Exeter and Newton Abbot. The most favoured line would be a direct line bored beneath Haldon Hill. But that wouldn't be opened until 2046.
2 0 4 6 ? I will be almost 100 years old by then ! The original railway builders seemed to link up major cities, with teams of navvies, in a year or two. But that was in the days before Environmental Impact Assessments, et al.
Don't even think about HS2's construction target dates.
Petras409 | 04.07.14 - 10:01 a.m. | #
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"... linking west, east and southeast London ..." ha ha, 2 stations in the outer reaches of South East London. I guess we should be happy.
Tina Lewis | 04.07.14 - 10:13 a.m. | #
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Thameslink 2000-and-counting has suffered badly from mission creep, originally just a way of getting rid of the dilapidated Holborn Viaduct station, it has now grown hydra-like to cover a huge swathe of the country from the fens to the South Downs. In order to get Brighton services through the middle, a complete reconfiguration of two termini is required, with extensive closures whilst the work is going on, affecting many other routes which will see no benefit at all - Greenwich line passengers are about to lose their direct Charing Cross services for good, and for three years will not even be able to get there by connecting services.
Like Crossrail, the idea was first thoughht up in the earlu 1990s, and will have taken a quarter of a century to complete. That is a longer timescale than that in which the entire "deep tube" network in Cenbtral London was built (from 1890 to 1907), or the electrification of the Soutern Railway's suburban network including the Brighton main line (1909-33), or 75% of the motorway network (1,700 miles).
England could win the World Cup before trains run from Shenfield to Reading. As for Crossrail 2 - preobably not in my lifetime!
timbo | 04.07.14 - 10:23 a.m. | #
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@Tina
The extension to Reading means that the number of stations south of the river served by Crossrail will have increased by 67% - to five. However, it doesn't help south London much, as three of them are in Berkshire.
timbo | 04.07.14 - 10:29 a.m. | #
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"If everybody in the UK contributed five pounds to the Crossrail project... we might just have ourselves a transport lifeline by 2015" ...shame the 'everybody' is not the same as the 'we' in this statement.
Grumpy Anon | 04.07.14 - 10:45 a.m. | #
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You might all enjoy this - the Department of Transport's 1989 Central London Rail Study.
www.railwaysarchive.co.uk/.../DoT_CentralLondonRailStudy1989.pdf
Of course the Chelsea - Hackney route was first formally marked out for a tube line as far back as 1955.
ap | 04.07.14 - 11:27 a.m. | #
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Agree with Grumpy Anon - if more of the transport infrastructure were designed/developed so that one didn't need to go through London to get from eg east to west (or vv), then London wouldn't be so crowded.
Blue Witch | Homepage | 04.07.14 - 11:33 a.m. | #
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@ap
"To assess the potential value of an intensive Thameslink service a scheme with 10 trains per hour from StAlban's to Wimbledon and Sutton, and 10 trains per hour from Enfield Chase to Croydon was tested, with new stations at Camberwell, Walworth and Southwark."
So they spend six times as much (£6bn instead of £500m in 1989 money - about £1bn in today's prices) and end up with 2tph to Sutton and no service at all to Walworth and Camberwell.
timbo | 04.07.14 - 2:00 p.m. | #
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The Victorians built simpler railways. Although some rail schemes did take decades to come to fruition. Take the concept of the Underground. There was a LOT of discussion on that.
And as for parliament, well you just had to have the right friends... And stuff the locals! The people who occupied the area around Kings Cross were often unceremoniously booted out.
Andrew Bowden | Homepage | 04.07.14 - 3:50 p.m. | #
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Funny how we once COULD construct things quickly.
"This report explains how the 55-mile northbound section [of the M1 motorway] was completed by John Laing and Son in 19 months and includes footage of the work taking place."
BBC - How the M1 motorway was built - Construction and The Built Environment Video
Briantist | Homepage | 04.07.14 - 4:19 p.m. | #
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Incredibly short-sighted of them to have fewer trains running from the west than from the east. Crossrail will change commuting patterns because it will be possible to get from (for example) Slough to Canary Wharf in a reasonable time for communting. Currently people living along the line coming into Paddington often don't work much further into London than the west end because it takes so long to cross London on the tube.
Laura | 05.07.14 - 8:35 a.m. | #
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@ Laura - I think the general view is that there will be big suppressed demand released in the West when Crossrail starts. However there are track capacity issues because of the need for so many other trains from further out than Reading. Crossrail trains can be extended to 11 cars so that gives some scope and I suspect TfL may have a contract option to order more complete trains if they wish. They just have to find the money to pay for them.
PC | 05.07.14 - 10:10 a.m. | #
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I'd imagine that they might well slap Crossrail roundels on the 315s before 2015; those things have been through many a repaint.
Silent Hunter | 05.07.14 - 10:53 a.m. | #
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@Silent Hunter - they may want to keep the shiny new image for the shiny new trains, rather than "tarnish" the brand by putting on 35 year old antiques. This is what they did with the Overground - lots of stickers with "temporary sign" on them
timbo | 06.07.14 - 12:16 a.m. | #
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@PC
The capacity issues caused by the additional trains from beyond Reading might be fixed by running Crossrail services beyond Reading to Newbury, Basingstoke or Oxford.
timbo | 06.07.14 - 12:19 a.m. | #
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