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People do like a good whinge in this country. I think that’s why we put up with a second-rate train service: it gives us something to complain about.

So it’s not entirely surprising to see that the announcement of Crossrail’s final go-ahead hasn’t been universally acclaimed. The service, which will link Shenfield in the east with Maidenhead in the west, and spurs running off to Heathrow and the Docklands, will be Europe’s largest civil engineering project since the digging of the Channel Tunnel. It’ll see a major new tunnel bored under London, several central underground stations upgraded as mainline rail termini, and places like Bond Street and Slough become an easy no-change commute from Essex.

24 trains will plough the east-west route every hour, with capacity for 160,000 passengers. In the words of the London Paper, ‘packed trains could be a thing of the past’ when the £16bn project, which will no doubt over-run, over-spend and end up opening 100% overdue and 100% over budget, finally opens some time after 2017.

But there are problems about which nobody seems to be talking. The Shenfield to Liverpool Street line is four tracks wide, with no room to expand. For much of its length it’s squeezed in between densely-packed urban housing, shops and office blocks, meaning the Crossrail trains, which will be metro services stopping off at pretty much every station, will have to run alongside and among the existing commuter services. How they’ll do this without either cutting current services or blocking the path of faster commuter trains has yet to be fully explained, at least in the popular media.

Then there’s the timescale. Crossrail was proposed in 1989, has taken 18 years to get fully funded and already cost £400m, yet it’ll be at least another year before the building work begins. That means much of it will be taking place at the same time as construction of the Olympic Park in Stratford, through which the route will run, inevitably leading to further delays, both in its construction, and to the services already using the lines.

Crossrail is an excellent idea that will do much for London, but the benefits for those who already use the lines on which it will run are negligible at best. Far better would be to invest in the infrastructure, build the necessary tunnels under London, and then allow the existing services to use them, rather that crowbar a new service into an already bursting commuter system.

Unfortunately, to do that, it would probably be necessary to crate a new super-operator that would run services right across the London commuter belt, taking over from the present operators. It would be a fabulously lucrative, and so eye-wateringly expensive franchise to win. But it would probably also give one single operator far more power than is good. Perhaps that’s why we’re destined to see dedicated Crossrail trains clogging up our crowded suburban lines still further.

So whether in the future you’ll be a Crossrail rider, or cross rail rider will seemingly be determined by whether or not you use a future Crossrail line already.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 10th, 2007 at 10:11 am and is filed under London, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.