A short history of Crossrail 2 (Part 1)

On By In Crossrail, Crossrail 2, Long reads

Starting via Crossrail 1

If Crossrail 1 is currently symbolised by ‘not on time, not on budget’, then how much does this tarnish, delay or otherwise impede progress with further rail schemes, particularly Crossrail 2? What other lions and elephant traps lie in the path of CR2? Does that scheme actually have a pathway? Is its current context happier than some navigational cairns on a inter-stellar journey to Planet Treasury? These articles aim to describe such matters.

We should start by understanding the factors behind Crossrail 1’s transmogrification in its most recent gestation period, from the Shenfield to Western suburbs/Aylesbury railway that had been rejected in the 1994 Parliamentary Select Committee, to the Crossrail 1 we know now. Crossrail 2 is already facing similar review processes, and it has now just undergone re-assessment of its business case for the fifth time, at the Government’s request. So let’s begin by looking at the general format of project development and approval, and then the sequence as it arose with Crossrail 1.

A ‘normal’ big project background

Quite often there is a ‘SAP’ type of assessment – Survey, Analysis, Plan – for example a review of current and foreseen needs projected over time into the future, then gap definition, then processes setting out a range of solutions not necessarily limited to one mode of transport or one land use masterplan.

The assessment may be tactical – for example, in relation to transport supply, there may be congestion or crowding on a group of rail services or corridors, or over- or under-provision of bus services. Such an assessment is then prioritised into service and capacity options and implications for budgets. If problems are endemic, or some solutions don’t get to the heart of the matter, then maybe a significant re-planning of service structures is needed, with capital investment requirements not just operational changes.

Sometimes the assessment is instead at city region strategy level – for example if London decides it needs to sustain or improve its World City capabilities, or the Northern Powerhouse wants to secure a 30 year network programme – when large-scale quality transport is most likely to be part of the long term planning requirement. Growth areas are defined at, say, zones S, A and Z, they need to be better connected, and there is a general requirement for extra capacity. Overall this may point to extra or revised railway corridors (and/or more wanted from trams/buses/walking and cycling etc) – and car capacity if outside dense urban areas. London’s 2050 infrastructure planning is an example of this.

However to make strategic changes on their own would ignore other prevailing shortcomings, and you can only spend the money once (if available at all!), so in practice the tactical and strategic assessments are often combined. The intention is to try to address issues on the foreseeably most crowded/operationally critical/politically high priority corridors at the same time as accommodating wider economic and growth desires.

It is this type of background which is faced by a Crossrail-scale of scheme.

Defining and getting project approval

The actual sequences of project definition and progress to construction are logical, even if they can be on a massive scale and always presenting new challenges and ‘known unknowns’ in the real world. Key topics to prioritise are:

  • A winning combination of project elements: What mix of routeings, existing and new growth locations served, long-term strategic capacity and tactical problem-solving represent the best outcome as an effective, value for money proposal? A long-term project is also vulnerable to the risks of seeking approval with that decade’s norms, for something which only benefits future decades, and when the collective voices of existing users and voters may not be the main beneficiaries of the proposed scheme, particularly if the result is more than one decade into the future.
  • Available funding: What are the affordability and financial constraints for a multi-billion scheme, and how can those be solved by willing authorities and partners? What combination of public and private funding sources will be acceptable? How much central government funding is needed, subject to what political rules and constraints? In all this, the how, how much and when of third party funding, has been an important element since the 1980s re-introduced the idea of railway funding not all coming from a state purse.
  • Political and policy challenges to overcome: Are there significant political hoops, policy targets and strategic challenges including changes to rules and objectives, which must be satisfied along the way? A large budget scheme needs clear Government (and all-party) support and funding acceptance. Think too of the new UK Net Zero Carbon requirement by 2050, as an example of significant policy impact at the current stage of Crossrail 2 specification.
  • Public and technical factors: What consultation, project adjustment, environmental standards and mitigation issues, design standards, operability, technical, software and other practical bottlenecks including supply-side constraints need to be managed effectively, along with a coherent and safety-orientated construction and delivery plan? In the case of Crossrail this has been a major challenge in all dimensions, as it was to be one of Europe’s largest projects. Consider just a few examples:

○ transitional and permanent access agreements and contractual commitments required on Network Rail lines;
○ large-scale interfaces with London Underground in terms of station safety, passenger flows and information handling;
○ train slot protection for other national rail users including freight;
○ up to 14,000 supply-chain staff at the height of the works programme; and
○ myriad construction sites and successor operational locations, each with individual safety, environmental, staffing and logistics challenges

  • Project support: A big project needs large-scale backing from stakeholders, communities, leading businesses and local authorities, and supporting bodies who can lobby at and above their weight. What supporters exist, and are how effective are they? The East London Line extensions had that, and so did Crossrail 1. There was also the Thameslink Consortium of supporting local authorities (not the similarly-named Consortium who bid and succeeded in supplying the Siemens Class 700 trains for Thameslink).
  • Powers to build: Which option to adopt to secure powers? – generally a choice of Hybrid Bill, Transport & Works Order (previously Private Bill), Development Control Order, or scheme of National significance.
  • Go ahead to build: With a big scheme, the Government invariably holds the controlling share. Preliminary acquisition and works might be funded ahead of approval for main works (as with HS2).

How Crossrail 1 survived the 1990s

What we know as Crossrail 1, aka the ‘Elizabeth Line’, had been favoured in the 1989 Central London Rail Study as the top priority rail capacity scheme to address known and foreseeable congested corridors and to support the capital’s economic growth, by offering large-scale capacity expansion for Central London. This one line would expand Central London’s transport volume by about 10%, hence commensurate economic growth was practicable. Second priority was a Chelsea-Hackney tube line, and third a Jubilee Line extension to East London. ‘Thameslink 2000’ was also favoured as a main line railway project, and had the highest benefit-cost ratio of all four schemes.

We have covered in Diving into the Fleet Part 5 how Canary Wharf Group succeeded in getting a revised Jubilee Line extension, via the Isle of Dogs, as the top railway scheme ahead of Crossrail. The main levers were a significant offer of private funding, and effective stakeholder dialogue with senior Government ministers. This was linked to a recognition that the change in land use achievable by a tube line was now worth having – a perception which the earlier Fleet Line schemes had lacked, when intended land use densities in Docklands were too weak to validate any business case.

However British Rail and London Transport also continued with the Crossrail project. With Government approval, they jointly sought powers in 1991 for a Regional Express Railway-style of tunnel between Paddington and Liverpool Street via the City and West End, for through running of main line commuter trains between Shenfield and Western suburbs/Aylesbury, as a similar concept to the Paris RER system’s Line A.

A 1994 House of Commons’ Private Bill Select Committee rejected the 1991 Crossrail Bill. The Committee’s specific reasons for rejection were that it didn’t serve Heathrow Airport, and lacked a connection with the Channel Tunnel Rail Link. This does not explain away the large economic effect of rejecting additional urban transport capacity (where Heathrow and CTRL are marginal to that issue). The implication is that not enough political touchstones were given attention in that version of the scheme, and that the Crossrail team didn’t argue strongly enough about the wider economic impacts for London and the South East. In contrast, RER Line A had explicitly been a cornerstone of the Paris Region’s development plans, see for example the intentions discussed here.

A technical block also arose – evidence by Steer Davies & Gleave (on behalf of LB Tower Hamlets) showed that Crossrail’s eastern tunnel entry/exit ramp at Shoreditch, between the Great Eastern Main Line and Liverpool Street, would conflict directly with the proposed alignment of the East London Line northern extension, where powers had also been requested. An at-grade diamond crossing for the two railways, Chicago-style, wasn’t viable with the planned frequencies.

The large scale Crossrail Private Bill was also promoted in the face of increasing parliamentary dissention about having to spend time adjudicating on the merits or not of major railway schemes. The DLR Bill for the Lewisham extension had nearly died when being assessed by a Commons Private Bill Select Committee in 1992/3, during which period the Government re-allocated the DLR from London Regional Transport to the LDDC and the extension’s Committee rebelled at this change. Only quick and astute briefing at a special session of the Committee had kept that Bill alive.

If this wasn’t enough negativity, the recession which arose in the early 1990s meant that it was possible to argue that it wasn’t urgent to press Crossrail forward at this time, even though any scheme would only open at the earliest during the next economic outturn – and more likely the one beyond that! Crossrail as a scheme barely survived such Treasury scrutiny in the mid-1990s. A ‘Crossrail-lite’ scheme was favoured by Treasury, to re-purpose paths on the Hammersmith and Circle Lines, but after investigation this was rejected as impractical and poor value.

There was a supportive rear-guard action by various officials, and by Ministers such as Steve Norris – then Minister for Transport in London – who relied on the fortunate existence of a 1990 ‘safeguarding direction’ to protect the planned tunnel alignment from adverse developments above or alongside (eg, deep piled foundations blocking future rail tunnels or stations). Transport Secretary Sir George Young was also cautious, and asked BR and LRT in 1996 to defer proceeding with a new parliamentary application (using a different authorisation process) until after the Jubilee Line Extension, Channel Tunnel Rail Link and Thameslink had been dealt with.

A Labour Government was elected in 1997 and the new Transport Secretary was John Prescott. There was an ambitious programme, which accepted the existence by then of Railtrack (in contrast to the pre-election suggestions of re-nationalisation) and looked to that organisation to take a lead in managing and financing major rail infrastructure projects, and getting involved in modernising the Underground sub-surface network. Three London area PPPs were advocated, with two tube PPPs and a third to modernise the sub-surface lines and also enable through Underground/main-line operations east-west and orbitally.

The east-west scheme was another attempt to re-purpose the north side of the Inner Circle. The findings were not encouraging, while the Ladbroke Grove train crash of 5th October 1999 gave another reason for the Transport Secretary to reject that PPP scheme (when Railtrack was already starting to head for its own buffers). The orbital scheme survived as the East London Line northern and southern extensions. The northern extension already had powers and was awaiting financial go-ahead, and the southern extension Order inquiry took place in 2000. Its new backer and funder was initially the Strategic Rail Authority (see below).

Defining the core project elements

Finally in December 1999, a London East-West Study was given the go-ahead by John Prescott, with an implied acceptance that something like a Crossrail service really would need its own tunnels. A favourable Transport White Paper, ‘Transport 2010’, was also published by the Government in 2000.

The East-West Study reported by the end of 2000 and was published in 2001, having been led by Keith Berryman. This re-opened the Crossrail agenda, and looked at East-West, East-SW, and SW-North/NE options. It concluded by supporting early progress with an East-West line as a Regional Metro with its core between Shenfield and Slough. Various branches were to be considered further. A SW-NE railway was supported as a slower pace project, with overtones of the Chelsea-Hackney tube though possibly at main-line size. Cross-London freight options were also considered.

This time around, Heathrow rail access was incorporated, while a CTRL link of sorts would be available at Stratford, so the Select Committee’s ‘naughties’ had their boxes ticked. However a rail link into the Thames Gateway corridor, which was another emerging political and planning priority, was not considered in detail by the study.

It helped that there was still a clear basic purpose for Crossrail, with an identified need for new rail capacity. The renewed impetus was taken up taken up in 2000-1 by two new transport bodies, the Strategic Rail Authority (initially the ‘shadow SRA’) and Transport for London, both being creatures of the 1997 Labour Government. Crossrail 1, as it eventually become known, was fortunate to get backing from Transport Secretary John Prescott and his 2002 successor, Alistair Darling. They accepted the need to back the London region as a key part of Britain’s growth plans for the 2000s and beyond. This was partly as a result of strong lobbying by London economic backers, such as London First and others.

Crossrail could be espoused as a genuine and also symbolic example of the Government’s determination to invest in transport. Bear in mind also that versions of these projects were previously foreseen and desired in the 1972-74 London Rail Study, so already these were 30 years later than the earlier aspirations for project progress. London didn’t have a dearth of schemes, it had a dearth of up-to-date projects ready to secure powers, and uncertainty about funding.

In Crossrail’s own history record, the London East-West Study was well-received by Government and as a result a project organisation, Cross London Rail Links Ltd (CLRL), jointly owned by the SRA and Transport for London (TfL), was set up to undertake project definition work on Crossrail and a feasibility study of a possible Hackney-SW London scheme.  CLRL’s initial budget was set at £154 million to proceed towards parliamentary powers, and the company was launched in January 2002. Keith Berryman was appointed to lead the project. A basic Crossrail 1 cost was then guesstimated as £3-£4 bn. A stakeholder consultation exercise was launched in May 2002. When the SRA was abolished by Government in 2006, the Department for Transport became the joint sponsor of CLRL along with TfL.

Not yet a winning combination

There was an historic imbalance of peak-time passenger demand east and west of London, with the latter offering lighter passenger loadings. So quite a number of trains would still terminate westwards at Paddington, returning east after a reverse on the surface at Westbourne Park. Options were then reviewed to make better use of the new tunnels, as just one line in the east and turning westbound trains short at Paddington risked poor use of the new tunnel and potentially poor value for money. Mapping from the Crossrail history shows the scoping and short-listing of options.

For example, a Paddington to Norbiton branch, via Richmond and Kingston, was proposed, with two route options, via Acton Central or Turnham Green. Canary Wharf Group (CWG) also lobbied strongly for a Crossrail branch in inner East and SE London, in the 1999-2005 period, as it saw political leverage with the Thames Gateway, strategic opportunities for a SE London catchment able to access Canary quickly, and also scope for direct Canary-Heathrow services. There was also a choice of route towards the Thames Gateway, via Charlton or the Royals.

Links to BBC archives show the range of Crossrail route options existing in 2003, with a map illustrating those. The BBC news headlines also provide a snapshot of Crossrail issues and its progress then, for example the item below:

“It would be “foolish and misleading” to suggest that London’s Crossrail project could be done “on the cheap”, the Transport Secretary has said. Alistair Darling warned MPs that the cost of the proposed rail link, which would connect east and west London, was likely to be “pretty substantial” – somewhere in excess of £10bn. At question time, Mr Darling said: “The cost will depend to a large extent on the nature of Crossrail itself … I am very cautious about costs, my experience over the last 12 months is that costs in relation to railways in particular usually turn out to be rather more than people first anticipated…So far as Crossrail is concerned, I think it is a very important project for the future development of London but I think it is important that we get it right.”

13 May 2003: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/3024199.stm

The strategic realism adopted by Alistair Darling by 2003, about the long timescale and the high cost but also long term importance of the Crossrail 1 project – is a signal to successor schemes. If the Government of the day isn’t so clear-sighted, and the purposes of the scheme aren’t well understood and, equally, advocated by leading politicians (as shown below) as well as stakeholders, then one might be in for a long wait for the next steps to be positive. Looking ahead, Mr Darling was later to be a Chancellor of the Exchequer under Gordon Brown as Prime Minister, at the time when Crossrail funding was at its critical go/no-go point in 2008/09.

In the background, much supportive technical and lobbying work on an extension towards SE London via the Isle of Dogs was sponsored by CWG, including breaking new ground on modelling which could anticipate the value of a different scale of land uses at the same time as changed transport links. Previously either the transport link or the land use model had to be fixed while the other was varied. Much of this modelling was then made available for the Crossrail Bill proceedings which followed from 2005. As a highly motivated stakeholder, the CWG work helped to ensure that a SE Crossrail branch would be included in the main proposals.

The July 2003 news headlines were that:

A multi-billion pound rail project to link west and east London will not be built for at least a decade, according to the government. Crossrail will not be ready in time to carry people to the 2012 Olympics, should London be successful in its bid to host the games, says Transport Secretary Alistair Darling. He told BBC’s Breakfast With Frost: “It was never going to be in place for the Olympics, we have made that clear from the start when we decided to put in a bid.” He believes London mayor Ken Livingstone was too optimistic in suggesting the project to link Heathrow with Stratford could be ready by 2012. “I think he knows full well it can’t”, he told the programme. “Crossrail is about building a new east-west rail link through a tunnel through central London – now in any view that is going to take some time to do. “We believe it is essential for London’s expansion, the big question is how is it going to be paid for?” He said the next stage would be to consult on the route and to ask for a “substantial contribution” from the private sector. “We are talking about a project that could be between £10bn and £15bn in cost. It is a huge project, one of the biggest the country will see.”

Last month Mr Livingstone and five council leaders wrote to Mr Darling to ask that he make a decision before Parliament rises on 17 July. They are concerned if a decision is not made before then, the timetable for the whole project will be thrown off course. Transport minister Tony McNulty said on Sunday the government was committed to making an announcement to Parliament this week.

Turning a wish-list into a project acceptable to Treasury

All this followed the anticipated (and updated) Crossrail Business Case which was presented to Mr Darling in July 2003.  He announced that the Government supported the principle of a new east-west Crossrail link, but wanted to be assured that CLRL’s proposal was deliverable. He appointed a review team, led by Adrian Montague, a Treasury adviser, to assess this in 2003-04 alongside stakeholder consultation. The evident message was that there was Government support, but not unconditionally and would need to take account of Treasury sensitivities.

The government has given the go-ahead for the £10bn Crossrail project that will link east and west London.

“Transport Secretary Alistair Darling said he fully supported the scheme in principle and that he would be consulting with the Treasury to see how much taxpayers’ money would be going into the project… Mr Darling is also assembling a team to look at the proposal for the link, which will speed train journey times through London. Crossrail could carry 200,000 people during the morning peak period and it is thought could create up to 100,000 jobs.”

A second Crossrail line was also referenced as a future project:

The Paddington-SW London line was dropped during the 2003-04 review, and the core scheme was determined to be Shenfield (E) and Abbey Wood (SE) to Heathrow and Maidenhead (W). Sections with any complications or evident risks were excluded (operational, construction related or financial – including the risk of scheme costs being loaded onto the Crossrail business case rather than other sponsors). These were from Abbey Wood south east to Dartford and Ebbsfleet, west from Maidenhead to Reading, and all north west schemes. Montague’s Review of the Crossrail Business Case is linked here.

A final consultation round was held between August and October 2004. The Autumn 2004 Spending Review provided no direct funding for the scheme, although the Government then committed to introducing legislation to enable Crossrail to proceed (which will have required agreement between DfT and Treasury), and to work closely with TfL and wider stakeholders to develop a funding and financing package.

Towards authorisation

The Crossrail Hybrid Bill was presented to Parliament in February 2005, and took three years to proceed through Bill scrutiny to receive Royal Assent in July 2008 – not a small period of time…

It should also be noted that alternative Crossrail schemes were proposed in 2002 and 2004. In 2002 GB Railways (Michael Schabas and colleagues) put forward a scheme called SuperCrossRail which would link regional stations such as Cambridge, Oxford, Southend and Ipswich via an east-west rail tunnel under central London. The tunnel was hoped to follow an alignment under the River Thames – similar to the current Thames Water tideway scheme. The year 2004 saw another proposal, Superlink, which was promoted by other current and ex-railway directors. In this case the proposition was to use the intended Crossrail tunnels for a longer distance commuter rail network with higher earning capacity, setting aside some of the shorter distance services.

Crossrail’s history chapters say that CLRL evaluated both proposals and rejected them due to concerns about network capacity and cost issues. The timing of these schemes suggests also that both were too late to be taken on board as significant alternatives, as they failed to secure political buy-in. (By contrast, CWG was proposing a specific branch to be added to the core official scheme.) The best time to influence the basics would have been not later than 1999-2000 when the London East-West Rail Study was announced. By then the real audience was Government, and especially DfT and Treasury.

In its planning through to the 2008 Crossrail Act and beyond that date, Crossrail 1’s detailed specification was constantly under review. Amongst other elements, the parliamentary proceedings required:

  • inclusion of a station at Central Woolwich for access and regeneration at this major SE London town centre – the station design was made better value with a shallower tunnel which allowed less costly cut-and-cover rather than bored tube at that point (and the station BCR was better than Crossrail as a whole). The then Transport Secretary, Douglas Alexander, was pointedly told by the Hybrid Bill Select Committee that either a station was included or the Bill would not progress further (a Hybrid Bill Committee has real teeth, it is not just advisory);
  • reconsideration and relocation of the main maintenance depot, from Romford to Old Oak Common (at that time, there were no plans for HS2, nor for a major interchange or area development there);
  • changes to Liverpool Street/Moorgate passenger capacity and links;
  • ‘plain line’ provision for an additional inner West London station at Kensal gasworks to support area redevelopment and regeneration in North Kensington;
  • a new resilient track design to minimise noise and vibration from some tunnels;
  • revision to the tunnelling programme to reduce the number of construction shafts and avoid the requirement for a long conveyor in inner East London;
  • adequate train slot provision for rail freight services, which hadn’t been considered fully by Crossrail and needed intervention by ORR.

Most of these requirements increased costs, which had reached £15.9 billion by November 2007. With foresight, rebuilding of Tottenham Court Road also included, as a precaution, adequate tunnel and circulating space for an eventual Crossrail 2 station on a north-south alignment.

However, apart from Montague’s initial branch lopping, Crossrail simultaneously sought to contain and reduce other costs. For example initial public consultation had suggested the possibility of escalators at many suburban stations, but these were pared back in the final capital programme, with more reliance on stairs. Such ‘value engineering’ – latterly associated with station design reviews to RIBA Stage F specification – became increasingly urgent beyond Royal Assent in July 2008, as the Treasury required £1 billion-plus savings. The Treasury sign-off was based on final estimated outturn costs of £14.6 billion, ie just below Alistair Darling’s indicative headroom of £15 billion stated in 2003.

A final funding package?

This will be discussed in more detail in a later article. In summary, the contributions ended up roughly in thirds: from the forecast farebox; from Government to reflect the national net value of the scheme; and from London and its businesses. The latter included a Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL) to be levied by London local authorities on medium and large businesses and developments, as a charge on the future value to them of building additional infrastructure. Crossrail would in turn be a primary charge on the CIL funding pot.

Construction was launched in May 2009 at Canary Wharf, where CWG was ready to go. Meanwhile Crossrail had announced in April 2009 that 17 firms had been accepted for ‘Enabling Works Framework Agreements’. The bulk of the large-scale construction packages were signed-off in 2010 and 2011. Although Crossrail demand modelling had looked to a 2016 opening, this was unlikely by 2008, and 2018 was adopted as the preferred date by the Coalition Government in 2010. At the time this was considered to incur a less costly and less pressured pace of construction and trial operations. It deserves repeating that this is one of the largest engineering projects in Europe, so the fundamental scale of the project merits recognition for what had to be planned and anticipated.

Treasury officials made a final request to stop or defer the scheme, when during the spending cuts decision-making they asked the new Coalition Chancellor in 2010, George Osborne, to consider dropping the main Crossrail spend which was about to start. The new Chancellor supported its continuation.

Scheme mutation and adaptation since go-ahead

We are not discussing here the cost and timescale overruns which have arisen with construction, except to note in passing that at least one bid to be the ‘Project Delivery Group’ for Crossrail included an experienced Director of Systems Integration, from a Swiss tunnelling environment. That bidding group was not appointed. Systems integration has turned out to be possibly the riskiest gap arising in the following nine years of Crossrail’s silo-based project management, until Mark Wild was appointed as Crossrail Chief Executive in 2018. Failure to appreciate the criticality of modern software systems developed by different suppliers, underpins that situation. The outcome has also raised questions about the pay and performance award criteria when managing such mega-projects.

For the authorised project, there were subsequent large and lesser proposals and alterations. In the case of Custom House, the removal of escalators from the plans was contested by Newham Council in 2012, against a planning appeal by Crossrail. Newham was successful. Crossrail had to agree to the provision of escalators there, as the proposed lift capacity would be inadequate for people with reduced mobility (PRMs) with some events at ExCel and other factors at that station. Provision for PRM also had to be increased at Ealing Broadway.

The political arrival of the HS2 project from 2009-10, with a proposed interchange at Old Oak Common, was not foreseen by Crossrail planners, neither before or during the Crossrail Bill. This has been an entirely new factor. If HS2 proceeds, there will be a four-platform Crossrail/GW relief line station. There may be four (or five) other fast track platforms, and now the possibility exists of another couple of platforms for any Chiltern overflow station once Marylebone fills up, after the latest West Midlands and Chiltern Route Study. HS2 would have six platforms of its own. Network Rail has still not finalised the track and signalling for ‘national rail’ OOC. HS2 now has architectural plans for its part of the station.

Even if HS2 were not to happen, which is a matter of current discussion among parliamentarians, the area redevelopment that was originally stimulated by the proposed Crossrail/HS2 interchange but now has a planning regime of its own under the Old Oak and Park Royal Development Corporation (OPDC), could leverage changes in where Crossrail trains reverse from the east. Some or all Westbourne Park reversers might instead use new sidings west of OOC, or see more trains heading further west. Options are open. As Harold Macmillan said: “Events, dear boy, events”.

Early development hopes for ‘Over-Site Development’ (OSD) in and around OOC were pulled back because the upfront build costs over railways or depots or sidings are unattractive for early development yield. It is likely to take several decades before any viable OSD can proceed. Initial estimates in 2012-13 pointed to Crossrail and London Overground service and access improvements around OOC being the better schemes to stimulate significant area development, with less achieved by HS2.

2014 also saw another ‘step-change’ for Crossrail, as in October 2014 the Mayor and TfL agreed that all Crossrail stations should become step-free. This incurred significant knock-on cost and substantial redesign of some suburban and commuter Crossrail stations, with consequent delay to local planning permissions and physical reconstruction. This was to be delivered as a project by Network Rail, and currently is not expected to be completed until the end of 2020, as stated on 17th July 2019 by Mark Wild to the TfL Programmes & Investment Committee.

Rail industry planning also re-opened the discussion about some extensions to the basic Crossrail scheme. In 2011, Network Rail’s London & South East Route Utilisation Strategy (RUS) looked at services towards Reading, Ebbsfleet or Gravesend, and on a NW corridortowards Watford and suburban stations along the West Coast Main Line to Tring:

  • Reading was reportedly a cost-avoidance deal on two fronts, that it was better value not to plan to run a separate GWR shuttle service between Reading and Slough, and instead to extend Crossrail to Reading – but only once the basic Reading station and junction rebuild costs were assigned within Network Rail rather than a share being allocated to Crossrail. An extension from Maidenhead to Reading was finally authorised in March 2014.
  • An Ebbsfleet or Gravesend extension fits with Thames Gateway housing priorities, but costs are large and it is possible to build the extension incrementally. The Southeastern main line network is quite unhelpful for a metro-type overlay, with multiple flat junctions and operational constraints east of Abbey Wood, so that any Crossrail extension has to be segregated as least as far as Dartford. Consequently ‘Crossrail to Ebbsfleet’ (C2E) is still a project dependent on housing projections and some belief that many costs can be paid for by developers. Helpfully, £4.85m project development funding was awarded by Homes England in March 2019.
  • The Crossrail-WCML schemewas stimulated by the possibility of reducing Euston’s transitional and final reconstruction costs in association with the HS2 scheme, by removing a significant number of commuter trains from the terminus. Average journey times via a Crossrail-WCML line would also be quicker than via Euston. However the step-free commitment for Crossrail caused a large financial impact, as all WCML platforms on the Crossrail extension would need to be made step-free.
  • This eventually undermined the extension BCR and the scheme was shelved in August 2016. In parallel there was nervousness within Crossrail Ltd about the performance risks to Crossrail services. This extension would make it reliant on through running across the Great Eastern, Great Western and West Coast lines, as well as the fundamental operability issues faced by tight headway management under Central London – a ‘Crossrail Main Line’ (CML) – about which, see here for the incentive and penalty regime faced by the Crossrail train operator!
  • Simplification of rail services to Heathrow was also desired in the 2011 RUS, and after much legal ‘ping-pong’ between Heathrow Airport and the rail industry, about slots and track access charges for use of the Heathrow tunnels, a solution has been agreed which lasts until 2028, with HAL withdrawing from rail operations but retaining marketing of Heathrow Express (HEX), GWR running the Heathrow Expresses with new trains suitable for standard ETCS signalling, and track charges pegged at reasonable levels for Crossrail trains, which will now also serve Terminal 5 as well as 2,3 and 4. Crossrail single fares will be less than HEX, but more than standard Zone 6.

Two other possible stations remain in the balance. The potential for a North Kensington station at Kensal Portobello continues to be reviewed. A Silvertown station to serve London City Airport is also advocated (for example see here and there). Who pays, and the project timing, would matter with both schemes. Both need planning permission.

Portobello station and track costs would be recovered from third parties, and could slot in with timing for OOC station works; its operability is currently being reviewed. However funding and timing for a Silvertown station is unclear. Any early construction is unrealistic there, as there are no powers for a station and the design impacts are significant because of anti-flooding walls (also for noise mitigation) close to the Thames Barrier. Further delaying the opening of the Crossrail SE line to Abbey Wood in order to build a stop (as has been advocated) is likely to get short shrift. Silvertown’s chances are best if considered as part of an Ebbsfleet extension which could improve station usage with direct access from SE London and North Kent.

Fitting in around

Crossrail 1 will still have to fit in with GWR and freight operations on the western tracks as well as sharing eastern tracks with freight, and depot operations at Seven Kings with Abellio and London Overground. At least a £25m Acton flyunder was opened in West London in 2017, to allow a conflict-free path for Acton freight yard and the spur to/from the North London Line.

Any combination of Heathrow Southern, Western or Windsor Link schemes (the latter has now arisen again) also has the potential to create service overlay and track access complexities via the Heathrow tunnels. The best that can be said is that this is all work in progress, among various rail industry and governmental interests. The possible scale of required interlocking of timetables on a previously simpler western main line with an airport branch, could bring on new train planning headaches west and south-west of London, and invoke the lurking devilment of accommodating the SWR timetable where everything revolves around the flat junction at Woking! Any further overlay from the Williams rail review is unknown at present.

It does however serve to highlight the considerable complexities of seeking to introduce a dense metro service onto tracks which historically have been other operators’ primary fiefdoms, and the impact of joining several fiefdoms together. The 2014 Track Access agreement between TfL, Crossrail and Network Rail, which also underpins the invest, delivery and reward relationship for multi-billion works on behalf of Crossrail, on the main lines west and east from central London (the On-Network investment), illustrates just one layer of complexity which has had to be addressed.

Orders for new trains and a maintenance depot and stabling sidings are another facet, with a £1 billion-plus cost. The parliamentary Bill diverted focus from Romford to OOC, for the main depot. The foreseen train requirement has grown, with an original 2008 estimate for 610 cars (equivalent to 61 x 10-car trains at 20m per car, about 205m per train). The car length has grown, so we will now have 66 x 9-car trains in a 205m format, with a reserve order of up to 18 trains. Already 4 of those 18 have been ordered, for the Reading extension and Heathrow 5 services.

The remaining 14 allow for expansion towards Ebbsfleet, but not enough for long term higher demand volumes which might require basic central London frequencies to rise from 24 to 30 trains per hour, and with an additional depot or stabling (possibly on a SE extension). The 9-car trains, and Crossrail infrastructure as a whole, have passive provision for enlargement to 11-car trains (nearly 250m length). However this will be a multi-billion pound capacity expansion so is not yet on anyone’s priority agenda. TfL considers that greater passenger benefit would be obtained by increasing service frequency rather than train length, although Network Rail would normally prefer to see longer trains rather than denser spacing of train slots.

To put the overall project into context, while the problems which emerged in 2018 have added about 2-3 years and nearly £3 billion to capitalised costs, TfL has also been forecasting £800-900 million additional annual revenue once the bulk of Crossrail opens. You can’t spend the money twice over, and TfL is also looking to Crossrail to help underpin other large-scale transport system costs such as contributions towards roads maintenance and bus operating deficits. However funding assistance towards some high-net-worth Crossrail extensions may also be viable and self-funding over time.

Unfortunately the extra project time and costs also postpone the day when Crossrail 1’s ‘Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL) mortgage’ is paid off and can be re-allocated from CR1 to Crossrail 2 or a wider range of projects. This is discussed in a later article, which will consider funding profiles.

A McDarling take-away?

What can we learn from all this, and consider how to apply to Crossrail 2?

  • Crossrail 1 and its overall economics are good for the national and regional economy, for London as a world city, and for the travel capabilities of millions of people in the wider East and South East. The greater the use of the core railway then the better the outcomes, it appears, providing that you can withstand the 15-20 year lead-in time and all the hassle of a truly huge project. (This is not necessarily the same as extending services to multiple distant destinations!) There will be a big payback nationally, even if delayed.
  • Without explicit, continuing, dependable political support lasting over six General Elections (and three of those for the formative period), you can allege that you have the best rail scheme around, but it won’t necessarily go anywhere. A continuous all-party all-Britain scale of backing was vital for Crossrail 1, for three elections in a row.
  • The nation as well as the London, East and South East regions should be grateful that one North Eastern MP, one Yorkshire MP, and two Scottish MPs, personally supported one of the biggest infrastructure schemes ever authorised in the United Kingdom. One was Prime Minister from 1997, another was Chancellor of the Exchequer and then Prime Minister, a third was Transport Secretary then Deputy Prime Minister, and the fourth became Transport Secretary and then Chancellor. The geographical line-up and the scale of visible national buy-in now, is different in these more febrile days.
  • Following the LRT/BR Crossrail debacle in 1994, there was barely enough Conservative ministerial support in the pre-1997 period, for project survival. The re-starting point was very rocky before London governance had been re-established. After 1999, two London Mayors, the newly-formed TfL, and London region stakeholders and businesses were eventually equal to the task of project validation, authorisation and finding enough local funding. The DfT’s direct involvement from 2001-02 under political direction, and with direct engagement as a sponsor from 2006, should also be underscored. It is the DfT (and Treasury) who have rescued the project in 2018.
  • Project cost capping was a self-evident factor from the moment that Government were involved. Crossrail 1 had a broad £10-15 billion cost headroom set from above, and £15 billion is roughly where it stuck until 2018. The full Crossrail 2 is currently north of £30 billion, but expectations are that considerable slimming will be mandatory, possibly below £20 billion as the outer limit. The scale of other big rail schemes, on HS2 and classic rail, plus strong claims from other regions, mean that affordable pork barrel politics are very much alive alongside Treasury cash-flow concerns.
  • The rail industry project management methodology showed itself to be inadequate for the sheer scale of project interactions and dependencies during European-scale construction, as is now self-evident with consequences which we are now paying for. The aspirations for a ‘world-class railway’ didn’t quite cohere.
  • 21st Century software complexities are highlighted as a huge rod for the rail industry’s historic 20th Century backs. The Thameslink project has also experienced delivery shortcomings as a consequence of silo-based project management, with software shortfalls and train non-availability, and shortfall of staff availability, training and familiarisation. A current airline equivalent could be perceived as the 737-Max, in respect of software and staff training – at least trains are being tested until they are risk-free on basics, before being put into any sort of passenger service (and then only on routes with compatible signalling).
  • The robustness of the post-Montague basic Crossrail specification will be evident once services start running – there is clear confidence in that. However there is an irrepressible transport industry desire, reflecting wider human society, to enlarge the scope and benefits of a basic project. The validity of each addition will need to be tested robustly. At least the post-Montague railway has built-in margins to be able to accommodate some extra volumes and retain deliverability.

The concluding question is, how many topics will people remember and reapply from all this, for Crossrail 2, and what new features and risks will have to be learnt anew? Not all those answers will be found from a re-examination of Crossrail 1.

136 comments

  1. A question that doesn’t sound serious, but is.

    If 21st century software is causing so many problems – with costs measured in the billions of dollars – why use it? Would a cheap mechanical system be better?

  3. @Eric

    Software allows much more flexibility and much finer control of systems, sophisticated fault detection capability, automated operation and near instant communication of operation and faults to other systems. This typically results in much more economical operation, much reduced labour costs, quicker modification (sometimes on the fly, depending on the system), and detailed operations logging for data analysis.

  4. @LBM – that’s what the engineers always tell us. However, the base case is almost always an earlier version of said software (and the latest is often better than its predecessor). What isn’t done very often (if at all) is a comparison between today’s software and the simple “blacksmith” version.

  5. where everything revolves around the flat junction at Woking!
    IIRC there are (again) plans to really, finally, do away with that permanent nuisance …. what’s the current “state of play” ?

  6. The title of this needs renaming hardly about CR2? There seems to be a bit of hindsight history mixing here but I could be wrong.

  7. @Graham H: What isn’t done very often (if at all) is a comparison between today’s software and the simple “blacksmith” version.

    Maybe not on National Rail, but London Underground have demonstrated very clearly the increase in frequency and reliability made possible by shifting to computer-based signalling (and driving) – eg. the difference between frequencies on the Jubilee pre and post resignalling. Or the business case for the Four Lines Modernisation etc.

    So to answer the original question, you can’t reliably and safely run the kind of service frequencies, at an adequate running speed for a regional metro, that justify the enormous expense of tunnelling without some kind of electronic control system.

    @A Gerald: understanding how major projects happen (or, more often, don’t) in the British political and administrative environment seems very relevant to the fortunes of Crossrail 2. Especially as the period that brought us Crossrail 1 feels like a lost (gilded?) era of political stablility and consensus.

  8. In the case of Custom House, the removal of escalators from the plans was contested by Newham Council in 2012, against a planning appeal by Crossrail. Newham was successful.

    The author modestly doesn’t mention who did the work to make the successful arguments in question.

  9. Ian J @ 24 July 2019 at 07:45
    “In the case of Custom House, the removal of escalators from the plans was contested by Newham Council in 2012, against a planning appeal by Crossrail. Newham was successful.
    The author modestly doesn’t mention who did the work to make the successful arguments in question.”

    Conor McAuley!

  10. @Ian J – I agree with you as a general point about signalling; I’m probably jaundiced by the creeping base case in the field of rolling stock where the cost of providing like for like in terms of capacity and performance moved ever upwards as the software got more elaborate. Call me sceptical (and I don’t mind that at all!) but the savings on maintenance were only ever justified – if at all – on the latest increment. LU had/has different objectives to NR.

  11. The two main specific difficulties that Crossrail 2 face, in my opinion, are:

    1 – It delivers much lower net benefits than Crossrail 1, on a standard appraisal; the gross benefits are lower, mainly because it has a shorter trajectory within the central business district, and its costs are higher, so net benefits are much lower.
    2 – Government has been reducing central funding for transport in London; as a result, other very urgent requirements in London like Piccadilly Line resignalling, and various overloaded bits of capacity needing enhancement, have been but on the back-burner again; in this environment, funding for Crossrail 2 seems difficult any time soon.

    There is also a general difficulty that all new railway scheme in this country face, which is that the unit costs of delivery here are so much higher than most other countries. This reduces the net benefit of any scheme, making it harder to justify them, and reduces the funding capacity. The cancelled Metropolitan Line extension is a clear case in point. Despite various efficiency reviews, and despite the gaping magnitude of the difference, there is no clear identification of what is driving this.

    Nevertheless, if HS2 proceeds to completion, there will be a damagingly serious capacity shortfall at Euston. It would be sensible to start thinking about some much more modest/fundable scheme than Crossrail 2 to address that.

    It would be a great step forward for this country if we could relearn how to conceive modest schemes. We could then afford many more of them. As JR writes, the validity of each addition needs strong justification. By GDP/cap (market exchange rates), the UK is now the poorest country in NW Europe (W of the former iron curtain, N of the Alps and Pyrenees). We need to learn how to match our spending ambitions to our circumstances.

  12. Re Alan Griffiths (& Ian J),

    “The author modestly doesn’t mention who did the work to make the successful arguments in question.”

    A certain J Roberts…

  13. Re Ivan,

    Also worth noting that the additional housing potential from CR2 is much bigger than CR1.

    Modest Schemes: the problem is that we have already done most of them, those that we haven’t need a bigger bottleneck removing as well to make them justifiable. Just look to the ECML which needs circa 15 separate modest schemes (8/9 digit schemes such as the current Werrington grade separation works and Kings Cross Throat rebuild kicking off in few weeks) to provide a noticeable capacity boost.

    The “modest” schemes left tend to get rather large like Windmill Bridge /East Croydon rebuild as most of the low hanging fruit has already been done. The only SWML low hanging fruit is arguably Woking and Clapham Jn to Waterloo resignalling and track re-purposing (Winsor lines losing 1 where it is 4 track)

  14. It is interesting that as someone who originally worked in the UK, now works in Australia, and frequently covers projects in the USA, people in all three countries believe they have a particular disease of “higher unit costs”. My suspicion is that – when you cut out places like China where neither property rights nor health and safety at work exist – everywhere is much of a muchness and everyone who thinks their country is uniquely expensive is failing to benchmark properly.

  15. Graham H
    What you probably miss is the vast cost in manpower & wages of the old, & extremley reliable ( provided you maintained them – more manpower-&-time ) systems.
    Look at one of the earliest examples – Bolton, where six manual boxes were replaced with two electro/mechanical ones in approx 1906, thus saving 4 sets of full-shift wages. Never mind the gains, even in the period 1939-60 where (by modern standards) “small” power boxes replaced mechanical signalling. Look no further afield than Waterloo-Woking or Liverpool St – Shenfield for classic examples of that.
    The current problems seem to stem from the difficulties in getting the on-train software to “talk” reliably to the trackside softwares, without mutually royally screwing with each others comms protocols .
    Now, I agree that these problems should have been foreseen earlier & dealt with. And also because I suspect that certain tech geeks did a lot of handwaving claiming that the problems were minor ones, when they were not.
    But that is probably a subject for a separate article, so I’ll stop right now.

  16. @Ivan – at the risk of repeating myself, HS2 is pretty well irrelevant to the case for CR2. HS2 can deliver -on the most optimistic assumptions, no more than 18000 pax/hr – many of whom will already be using Euston at the moment. At the usual 70% filled capacity used by IC planners, 12000 would be a better figure. Euston is served by LU lines offering a total of around 100 000 spaces/hr, not to mention a dozen bus routes offering 10-12000 spaces/hr, + taxis + pedestrian movements + people travelling back out on the dc lines. The additional CR2 punters arriving at Euston may well be down in the lower 4 figure range – a year’s growth on LU – and that after the numerous years it will take HS2 to fill.

  17. On the subject of unit costs this is something I have asked here and elsewhere and never got a satisfactory answer to. For example, in Madrid, a new section of metro is going to be built, 6.4km with 4 stations, all underground, including complicated interchanges, for €300m. About the cost of the Croxley link

    Roads are the same, Norway can build tunnelled motorways for less per km than rural dual carriageways in the UK.

    It just doesn’t make sense

  18. Greg seems to have missed Graham’s point that blacksmith-wise he was principally referring to rolling stock.

    However, the issues are interlinked, because nowadays trains have to communicate with signalling systems, and this is only possible if both ends of the link make use of much software. There are also rising expectations in things like passenger information systems etc.

  19. CWG “succeeded in getting a revised Jubilee Line extension, via the Isle of Dogs, as the top railway scheme ahead of Crossrail”. CWG “also lobbied strongly for a Crossrail branch in inner East and SE London”. Given their past successes, it must therefore be a concern that CWG are now pushing a new line from Euston to Canary Wharf to ease congestion on the Jubilee Line, and relieve Euston if CR2 does not proceed. https://www.newcivilengineer.com/latest/exclusive-canary-wharf-group-in-talks-about-rail-link-to-euston/10041923.article

  20. @Taz I’m not sure why that itself should be a concern – providing CWG are willing to fund it entirely*, then it should have no financial impact on any other scheme (although it may affect BCRs by changing the expected benefits of proposed schemes, which, with the exception of directly competing schemes, I imagine in most cases the benefits go up, not down.)
    Of greater concern is the interaction between any such link and any existing/proposed infrastructure.
    e.g. If it was, as I have seen proposed, an extension of the DLR from bank, how does this affect crowding on the existing DLR from bank/tower?

    *I don’t know if they are proposing to fund it entirely, but TfL could certainly suggest that they do!

  21. A seriously good article, which I have shared around. With regards to Lesson 3, Jeremy Hunt’s proposal of giving the National Infrastructure Commission executive powers would have hopefully got rid of this programme risk. Or may be we will see more schemes (e.g. a la Heathrow) target the Development Consent Order process.

  22. Excellent article which admirably shows that many of the issues with such large projects can only be determined in retrospect.

    In terms of unit costs for new railway construction, the study from PwC at https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/755650/high-speed-rail-international-benchmarking-study.PDF is an interesting comparision of international high-speed projects, including HS2. Whilst not directly related to CR2, it does make a number of observations around areas where UK costs are higher, which are directly relevant to CR2.

  23. Graham H – thanks for that. Since my source was official reports, I wonder if my the alternative claim is actually another case of what I now discuss.

    NGH – You misunderstand what I mean by modest schemes. For each scheme we actually do, there are numerous more modest versions alternatives we didn’t do. Thus there are numerous modest schemes available to us, they are just not what we do. There must, for example, be a modest versions of the Met Line Extension, what the French or Dutch or Spanish would have done in that situation. Doing that is probably a lot better than doing nothing. But, apparently, we have standards and can’t possibly do the modest version.

    Yes it’s true that CR2 presents greater regeneration possibilities than CR1. But that is nowhere near sufficient to reverse the cost-benefit arithmetic I describe, at least according to our usual ways of taking such things into account. Some sites in North London are commonly mentioned. We need find more modest ways of making sites like those attractive development propositions than a £40bn mega-scheme.

    In fact, I look at Enfield as a whole and wonder what it is that makes it such an economically depressed place when its location and transport infrastructure doesn’t seem to be materially different from thriving suburbs. I travel in on the Met/Chiltern route, and all the way from Harrow to the tunnel at Finchley Road are large new developments, densifying by building upwards, to make better use of the land with good existing transport connections. It seems to me that is good and sensible, and it didn’t need a huge new transport megascheme. It was other things that were needed to unlock the development potential.

  24. What Canary Wharf pushes does have a direct impact on the chances of Crossrail 2. Mainly because if they did build a new line between the Wharf and Euston it won’t be built with private money, it might get a big chunk from higher business rate levy but the main cost will come from Central Government in one form or another. London is never going to get more than one mega project built at a time.

    A new line between the Wharf and Euston could hit the important business clusters at the Wharf, Northern City fringe and and now at Kings Cross where powerful and influential companies have made their homes. Cross rail 2 serves the rather diffuse and secondary office markets in Victoria and Tottenham Court Road.

    Also a scheme that is in the £5 to £10 billion range is just easier to get built than a £20 billion plus one. You could argue that such scheme, plus the Bakerloo line extension could be had for much less money. You’d get greater political uplift from two smaller schemes than one mega one.

    Schemes that benefit inner London more, could have greater political appeal for the Mayors office and Labour and Liberal politicians.

  25. @Ivan I’m often struck that some of the most popular places to live in london have appaling transport, notably Muswell Hill, Crouch End, Dulwich, Chelsea, Stoke Newington. What they do tend to have is housing people want to live in, and great schools. Meanwhile the places that see the most investment on transport remain unpopular. Parents chose to suffer the walk-bus-tube commute because it offers the family a better life as a whole.

    How much less than £40bn would it cost to build desirable houses and make the schools awesome in the upper lea?

  26. @Jamesup
    Actually, Muswell Hill, Crouch End and Stoke Newisngton, as well as parts of Dulwich, were certainly not in demand 30 years ago, but were in the poorer parts off London – partly because of their poor transport links. Because they were relatively cheap they became prime candidates for gentrification from young professionals at the time. These young professionals have now become well-to-do professionals on the brink of retirement, having invested heavily in their homes and spent lavishly in their neighbourhoods on the services and shops that have developed to support them. The same is true for many parts of inner London that have gentrified either before or later – Camden Town, Kentish Town, Highbury, Tower Hamlets, to name but a few. Almost certainly, those with better transport access gentrified sooner and those with poorer access (Hackney and most of south London) later.

    Chelsea, of course, was always a different story and relied on taxis, being that much closer to the West End.

  27. @Jamesup/quinlet – another factor is the potential scope for improvement in the housing stock. When I was a lad (ho hum), houses of the “third and fourth sort”, as in Islington and their mid-Victorian successors (as in Earls court) , were regarded as worn out and tired but as the arrival of the Victoria Line demonstrated in Islington, that stock had the potential to be upgraded – large rooms, three stories, moderately stately frontages. I dare say parts of Holloway will similarly come up (and may already have done so) even though the housing stock is a mix – as has happened in, say, Brixton. The difficulty with Enfield is probably the potential of the existing stock for radical improvement, as it will be a difficulty for the interwar suburbs ere long.

  28. Quinlet
    Almost certainly, those with better transport access gentrified sooner …
    [Snip! LBM]
    I was expecting house-prices in Walthamstow to rocket during 1970-71 as the effect of the Victoria Line became apparent … nothing.
    It wasn’t until after the recovery from the early nineties recession that things started to move. Now, of coure, there are some utterly insane prices being asked.
    … and – Graham H
    The answer to that, in Enfield, as here is the: “Loft Conversion”

  29. @jamesup – growing up in a car free house in transport starved Dulwich in the 1960s, it was astonishing how many obstacles were thrown in the way of improving the situation. The College Estates, whose main objective then as now seems to be blocking any and all change, somehow managed to ban any buses travelling through Dulwich Village and Dulwich Common (the South Circular), finally relenting with the P4, originally using tiny Ford Transit minibuses and with a route seemingly designed to prevent much use. Shades of Chelsea’s objections to a CR2 station – anything to keep out the riff-raff!

  30. B&T,

    The estate actually owns many of the road and pay for the up keep, hence the incentive to keep heavier loads away (see Hunts Slip Road railway bridge decay as they don’t want to pay for the repair). One of the biggest issues is the low bridges some of which have gradually been addressed as they become expired but still many prevent double decker running and sensible economic.

    Dulwich actually has a listed bus shelter, which is actually never used as it is away from the main traffic flow.

    The estate governors can be excessively petty for example preventing Barclays from having an external cash machine so the branch eventually closed a few years back.

  31. Quinlet: Muswell Hill, Crouch End, Stoke Newington had ‘arrived’ by 1989. I’m not sure if Muswell Hill was ever down on its uppers.

  32. @HACKNEYITE

    I lived in Muswell Hill in the 1980s and it was a right old dump. I lived meters away from The Muswell Hill Murderer’s place at 23 Cranley Gardens, for one.

  33. @ngh – didn’t know about the listed bus shelter in Dulwich – where is it??

    Hunts Slip Road bridge is a really depressing sight. I still go over it from time to time and cannot believe the Estate, who are not exactly short of cash, leave it in that state even if they retain the weight limit and chicane to reduce heavy (in both senses) road traffic.

  34. @Quinlet @Hackneyite
    I think the relationship between an area’s desirability, economic success, transportation and house pricing is more complex than this discussion suggests.

    I think the point of bringing better transport to places like Enfield is that it allows (many more) new homes to be built there, rather than being an effort to turn it into the next Hampstead.

    Muswell Hill and Crouch End are “suburbs of Highgate” and Stoke Newington is a “suburb of Islington”. That’s nothing to do with transport, and everything to do with historical demand and affordability. That said, all are also far closer to Central London than Enfield, so non-rail connectivity is much easier.

  35. Re B &T,

    I suspect they are quite happy to keep traffic (especially heavy) diverted as much as possible.

    On a positive note they are currently remodelling the College Road / Dulwich Common junction to make things easier to buses and coaches (the 3 schools run over 41 coach routes)

    Listed bus shelter:
    At the very bottom of South Croxted Road just off the roundabout

    https://www.google.com/maps/@51.4287243,-0.0864719,3a,60y,354.63h,78.06t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1ssUWCeNVeHbHNqQKYMBs_tA!2e0!7i16384!8i8192

    Complete with the history display visible.

  36. @NGH – Thanks! Must have walked / cycled past it thousands of times (my first Significant Other lived just around the corner in Alleyn Park) without ever noticing it. The ignorance of youth…

  37. The cost issue with CR2 is largely a result of it wanting to achieve so many objectives – Victoria, Piccadilly and Northern line relief; SWML relief; new housing on Lea Valley. That results in some very expensive parts of the project, namely the vast rebuild at Wimbledon and Tooting and the entire branch to Alexandra Palace and beyond. We shouldn’t underestimate the cost of upgrading NR sections as well, as CR1 has shown. Originally, ‘Chelney’ was about boosting connections between inner SW-NE and relief on the VL.

    It might be best to split CR2 into distinct routes rather than try to achieve so much with one new route. In that sense the focus should probably go back to relief of the VL and sticking to lines NE rather than building a new underground link to Southgate. The Chingford branch is, segregated and underused and could be paired with the route out to Cheshunt. Clapton is a poorly served part of inner London that could do with a boost, plus you can continue with a route to Dalston Junction. There is space to portal around Walthamstow Marshes. The Piccadilly line will receive a degree of relief anyway. In the south, the cheaper option would be take over the Southern inners to Norbury and Crystal Palace, tunnelling just after Balham heading north (there is plenty of space for a portal). Yes there may be fewer benefits but the costs would be substantially lower than new stations and tunneling between Tooting, Wimbledon, etc. It also aligns the route much better with current passenger commuter patterns and gives a lot more relief to the VL in the south and Victoria rail station. I appreciate the SWML is ‘full’, but there are means to to boost capacity outside the scope of CR2 over the immediate future and as part of the national transport budget, and besides, in terms of connections it would be far more useful for passengers into Waterloo to have a link that goes via the City and CW than to taking them to Victoria and KXSP.

  38. Perhaps Euston will not seize up with the additional HS2 traffic, but it has to be said that it has relatively poor underground links.

    At the very least HS2 should bring about a second entrance to Euston Square station on the western side. I’d also argue that extending the DLR from Bank to Euston (and getting rid of the Tower Gateway branch to increase frequency to Euston) would be a highly desireable project in terms of decongesting existing tube lines around Euston and providing adequate links between HS2 and Canary Wharf.

    I also very much agree with the point that today’s ‘desireable’ neighbourhoods are the slums of yesteryear. There is also another, oft overlooked aspect to their desireability. Because the UK property market does not bother with telling its customers what the surface area of each dwelling is (unlike on the Continent), developers have continued to shrink the size of houses built over the years. A 3-bedroom Victorian or Edwardian terrace will therefore be much bigger than a 3-bedroom mid-2000s flat – and will therefore also be more desireable.

  39. @BRIAN BUTTERWORTH 29 July 2019 at 18:49 – ‘I lived in Muswell Hill in the 1980s and it was a right old dump. I lived meters away from The Muswell Hill Murderer’s place at 23 Cranley Gardens, for one’.

    It has always seemed to me to be a strange coincidence that the 1960s Soviet spies Peter and Helen Kroger lived in Cranley Drive (Ruislip).

  40. Straphan @ 30 July 2019 at 11:11

    ” HS2 should bring about a second entrance to Euston Square station on the western side. ”

    I understand there’s a design, involving closing the northern end of Gordon Street, WC1. More complicated and expensive would be linking that directly into Euston LU station.

  42. @ANONX

    Your points about Clapton, I think, might be overlooking the current use of the Hackney Downs, Queens Road Tunnel, Clapton Tunnel, Clapton Curve, Coppermill Junction for the Stanstead Express services from Liverpool Street every 15 minutes.

    That’s why the London Overground services here are limited to 4 trains per hour, they have to follow the non-stopping services on their way to Chingford. That’s why the Chingford trains don’t stop at Cambridge Heath or London Fields.

    My recent visits to the area suggest there isn’t much scope for development: the existing housing stock is private and in good order, so little chance of creating a Meridian Water, for example.

  43. ANONX @ 30 July 2019 at 10:30

    What are the “means to to boost capacity outside the scope of CR2 over the immediate future and as part of the national transport budget”? My recollection of NR’s Wessex Route Study was that CR2 was the best of three alternatives for increasing capacity as it addressed challenges on both surburban and long distance services?

  44. Is not a related issue with the practicality of funding and building CR2 (3,4…) that whereas it could be well argued that CR1 was a benefit for the whole southeast, reaching Essex, Kent, and the Thames Valley, subsequent projects can’t so easily demonstrate their ‘not just London’ credentials.

    I regularly find myself arguing the wider benefits of HS2 and CR2 against charges that so much money is being spent just to suit London to the detriment of ‘the North’.

  45. @A-MOUS

    CR2 might be the ‘best’ but is it the only option? Perhaps an option that has fewer benefits but is still sufficient might be more appropriate given the financial constraints.

  46. Couldn’t they at least tell some of the various brilliant ideas to bugger off, and focus on getting the base project working? I can’t help but feel this whole story could have done with more focus.

  47. Anonx
    Sorry but your portyal of the Chingford branch is simply wrong.
    In the AM peak, about 25-30% of any “up” train empties out at Walthamstow, to catcth the Vic-line, but when it arrives at Liverpool St, they often disgorge over 1000 passengers from an 8-car train ….
    I’d be really careful about placing of tunnel portals on that flood plain of the Lea [Snip. LBM]

  48. Re Anoyx,

    The problems with alternative routings is that the costs aren’t that much lower but the benefits are significantly lower.
    Wimbledon and Tooting are actually every cheap for the benefits provided.

    Relief of the Victoria line from the south can only really be achived by removing the majority of those who transfer from SWR at Vauxhall and Northern Line at Stockwell which means addressing Wimbledon / SWML and Tooting Broadway* /Northern Line

    *A major bus heading point from surround areas to South & West (and some from the North). Tooting Broadway usage is on par with NR’s Fenchurch Street to put it into context.

  49. There are a lot of costs (mainly in the billions) quoted in the article. Are they comparable? Or are their values what they would have been in the year they were derived? Or a mixture of the two?

    It is annoying not knowing whether they can be compared.

  50. @Anon-X/NGH – the problem with CR 2 seems to be that it is trying to solve several different issues at the same time and therefore doesn’t really solve any: there is the SW Inners problem; the Victoria/Northern problem; the Hackney access problem; and the Lea valley problem, possibly. Simply drawing a line between them, in an excess of crayonism, doesn’t solve any of them. A minimum of two quite different schemes seem to be needed: a SW Inners-City-LST Inners (balanced flows, takes people where the jobs are); and some form of Hackney-Chelsea successor (confined to the built up area). There, that’s enough counter-crayonism for an evening.

    @Alison W – even better not to try and defend the indefensible….

  51. Brian Butterworth
    The Muswell Hill murderer was a securely- paid member of the middle class!

  52. @ GREG TINGEY 30 July 2019 at 16:32
    “I’d be really careful about placing of tunnel portals on that flood plain of the Lea.”
    Vic. Line, Jubilee line, CR1, all have these!

  53. Taz
    Yes, but … there are precautions, like large walls – or being set back just that few significant meter-or-so higher up.

  54. @NGH

    Many of those changing at Stockwell have boarded the the NL at Balham from the Southern inners, while Brixton is now as busy as Vauxhall and a huge number of those passengers are commuters on buses from Streatham, which has several Southern stations that people ignore. Also, SWML passengers would have the option to change earlier at CJ – to a faster and more comfortable train than the VL.

    The problem with the ‘very cheap for the benefits’ – which I dispute btw – is that in absolute value terms they are not very cheap but very expensive. It’s all very well saying you get all these forecast benefits for almost £40bn, but the point is it’s still almost £40bn. There has to be a point at which you say “right, what benefits do we get for half that amout and are they sufficient?”. And as I show above you’d get a more VL relief for less taking over the Southern inners after Balham. CR2 also does nothing for the congestion on the NL towards the City – when is that going to be tackled? Not soon if we’re spending so much on CR2.

  55. I believe Graham H’s idea is more sensible than the current proposals for CR2. Thousands of people want to get to the City from Waterloo each morning, and the W&C can’t cope with it anymore – last time I tried to do this trip I queued for 15 minutes to board the W&C (on a regular weekday with no delays either on the mainline or on the W&C).

    I’d therefore suggest that the issue of getting people from Chelsea & Victoria to the West End should be left for a different project (projects?) to sort out.

    (Given this post effectively postulates an extension of sorts for the W&C, I wonder how long it stays up :P)

  56. @Straphan – thank you for the vote! Just to avoid the accusation of going native on the Drain, at the back of my mind was a link between the SW inners and the GE Inners that avoided Bank itself (for space reasons) but passed through the City around City TLK and Moorgate for the obvious connexions. The advantage of splitting off the SW/GE project from Hackney-Chelsea, over CR2 is that it avoids overloading the existing LU network as the trip end distributors. CR2 relies heavily on the Central and perhaps the Elizabeth Line to get people away from TCR (“MidTown”) to where they want to go -for many it’s Mayfair and the western end of Oxford Street, or the City – more overload for the Central and Elizabeth.

    Quite where you portal under such a scenario raises difficult issues – CR2 cuts off its nose to spite its face by leaving it so far west; it would be highly desirable to capture the Reading Line Inners which are heavily loaded and have astonishing counterpeak traffic. But that implies portalling east of Clapham(or split portals), with the one locationally tricky and the other expensive. When I last looked into I, in NSE days, there appeared to be just about enough room to sink down immediately after Clapham roughly on the site of the present carriage washer, although this is a constricted site and the embankment isn’t likely to be consolidated. And you would have to sink at a pretty steep gradient to get under the WLE.
    At least it’s on the right side.

    Other intermediate stations – not developed, but something in the Charing cross /Embankment area would probably have been good,

    Sorry, I didn’t have time to look into portalling on the eastern side – our collective efforts were directed to getting CR1 up and running even if we believed that SW/GE had better benefits for BR. Depends which GE group one would have wanted to pick up. Far too late to put another horse in the field.

  57. @ AnonX 31 July 2019 at 09:59 @NGH “CR2 also does nothing for the congestion on the NL towards the City – when is that going to be tackled? ”
    @ straphan 31 July 2019 at 15:46 “the W&C can’t cope with it anymore”

    Upgrades almost ready to go, just add money. W&C with Picc style high-capacity trains was planned alongside Picc with 40% uplift, but now slipped in with Central line to try full-auto operation. Northern World Class Capacity with 42 Picc style trains and a new Camden Town station could provide 36tph split service; 60% uplift north of Kennington, 25% to Morden when existing trains also replaced, say at 30 years in 2026. Signalling will require tweaking. Releases current trains to boost Jubilee to 36tph also. Trains £2.6bn

  58. @AnonX

    “The problem with the ‘very cheap for the benefits’…..is that in absolute value terms they are not very cheap but very expensive. “

    This may be true, but it’s not how project finance works.
    Financing an infrastructure project is a bit like buying a house with a mortgage. If you want to buy a £5m house and happen to work a job that earns £1m a year, the bank will happily hand over the cash. If you want to buy a £100k house but only earn minimum wage, or even a bit more than that, the answer will be no. Absolute value is of little relevance, the benefits – ie your future earnings – dictate what you can afford.

    There’s not really any shortage of investment cash if the returns promised have the right balance of magnitude and risk. There are limits to government borrowing, but they are political limits, which doesn’t make them any less real, but it does make them less strict. The billions seem eye-watering but are spread over many years of development and pale into low significance against other government spending (£130bn a year for NHS England alone…) Private finance can help, as can mechanics like the infrastructure levy which helped fund CR1 and the NLE.
    The sale (and re-sale) of the HS1 lease is an example of how tangible transport assets, once built, can be sold to help support further government borrowing on infrastructure.

  59. Interesting people are talking about CR2 serving South Central inners. As a South Central man, I’ve always wondered if this was the best idea but it raises a few problems…

    1. How much traffic could you realistically get over Balham Junction? Especially with the Horhsam fasts in the mix as well?

    2. What would happen to the VIC-LBG trains? Clearly these could become part of Crossrail as well…would they return to LBG to Crystal Palace trains instead?

    3. Even if you have to portal south of Balham, it gets incredibly tricky to do so. The only places I can see is just north of Streatham Common junction, which would require the demolition of a 1980s built gated community or on the site of the giant Tesco in Streatham and then loop the tunnels back west towards Balham.

    4. There’s just too many criss-crossing lines on the Central. You’d have to segregate the Victoria and LBG trains by building interchanges at Streatham Common and Leigham Court between Streatham Hill and West Norwood, but what about the Thameslink trains that add into the mix? Where would these go?

    Agree with GH that the SW-NE route would be useful, perhaps via City Thameslink and Cannon Street giving the southern part of the City better access. Leaving CR1 to serve Canary Wharf only. But that will then throw up the HS2 Euston capacity argument.

  60. @Margret Thatcher – the SC proposals are solving (?) a different set of problems to CR2 – CR3? (Not that any alive today will see that…).

    Leigham was – had NSE survived- being considered as a possible new station and interchange as part of a long term simplification and metroisation of the SC Inners. At the time, it didn’t seem worth doing as a standalone scheme but times have changed. Unfortunately, TfL London Rail doesn’t seem to have an interchange programme beyond its immediate boundaries.

  61. @Paul

    Financing is one thing, funding is another. Even if some kind of privately-financed tool is agreed to cover the whole project the financier will need to be repaid over a period of time plus interest. Given there is a very real political limit to how much central government will fund a massive new rail line many of these sources must be local. The current position is that even with future revenue, an extension of the BR payment scheme and so on we’re a long way from securing enough funds to proceed (realistically TfL would have to mortgage future revenue for something like 50 years. But then it kills the ability to fund any other project and there are other needs). Think of the far more modest Bakerloo, were despite huge development potential there is simply no funding with the current tools available . In this sense the cost is barrier because it stretches funding requirements (unless it also equally extends revenue potential).

    @GRAHAM H

    I mentioned the SC inners largely because I also agreed that a route from the SWML to the City and beyond (NE or E) would be good. I don’t therefore think we also need a direct SW-N/NE route as well, not least if they can change at CJ (or elsewhere). As someone who has lived both in Streatham and Crystal Palace, I can say that South ‘central’ could really do with a step-change in connections and capacity. For zone 3 the rail frequency and connections is dreadful. A metro route offering frequencies of 10tph or more would massively improve commuting in this area area as well provide heavy VL relief.

    Anyway I’ll stop there!

  62. @Graham H: The City isn’t exactly huge, and is walkable in 20 minutes or so end-to-end. I’d suggest building the station where there is actually space left to build it…

    In terms of what the service should swallow up, I suggest it takes in all trains via Seven Sisters, Chingfords, and West Anglia inners (as far as Hertford East), using two new tracks on the West Anglia Main Line. This leaves empty space at Liverpool Street for additional trains off the West Anglia and Great Eastern.

    At the South Western end, bear in mind the key constraint to running more inners into Waterloo is the lack of available platforms, as well as the lengthy dwells at Vauxhall and Clapham Jn, as passengers negotiate the metre-high chasm between the platform and a very full train. By building Crossrail 2, these constraints go away. I’d therefore suggest boosting the frequencies on the inners.

    The frequencies on the Windsor Lines are constrained chefly by the need to mix fast (Reading/Windsor) and slow (Hounslow/Weybridge) services, level crossing downtimes on the Hounslow Loop, and the existence of only 3 tracks between Vauxhall and just north of Clapham Jn. Transferring some or all of these trains onto Crossrail 2 would not resolve these constraints. I would much rather Crossrail 2 made a detour to run via Balham and relieve the Northern Line, then Clapham Jn, Waterloo, and from there towards the City.

  63. Comments regarding 737Max are not helpful. The fundamental problem with the plane is that it was to compete with an Airbus 1980s design which had a higher wing – deliberately because it is a more recent design than the 737 – a 1960s design. The Airbus design had a bigger more fuel-efficient engine, easily added. On the 737Max the larger engine was accommodated by redesigning the wing because the 737 had a much lower wing that the Airbus. However, Boeing sold the aircraft as if pilots of existing 737s required no re-training to fly it, on what was to fly a different aircraft. The software issue is a red herring – the question is why the aircraft was approved by the US air safety board as being like the existing 737 one of the most common aircraft in the world when it was very different.

    Sorry to be a pedant, but you really need to understand what has happened.

  64. Crinan Dunbar,

    At the time of the article being written the relevance of the 737max invoked some behind the scenes discussion along the lines that you suggest. In the end, the majority editorial decision was that it was relevant – very much so.

    If people could hold off responding to this we will endeavour to provide a more complete explanation.

  65. Re Crinan Dunbar,

    Many commentators might disagree – it still highlights many non airframe issues (all of which are immediately transferable to rail especially in the UK currently as there is about to be a tidal wave of software /system integration issues publicly rear their head):

    – Software quality as deployed (including specification e.g. reliance on a single sensor and how to deal with sensor failure/malfunction)

    – Software assurance (or lack thereof, including regulatory oversight )

    – Training – trying to avoid it or underestimating the logistics / cost of doing it .

    UK TOCs / Owning groups / ORR / RAIB / RSSB are all starting to ask awkward questions about software testing assurance and change roll out. Every rolling stock manufacturer /supplier is having issues, some have been more open than others…

  67. Always look at the hidden agenda.
    Who funds the “taxpayers alliance”. It’s generally people and organisations who avoid paying UK tax…

  68. @Island Dweller – and a general inquiry into the planning abilities of TPA’s advisers wouldn’t come amiss either. Their report is an entertaining exercise in extreme crayonism – not to mention that some of the proposals are mutually exclusive. I wonder of anyone looked a map.

  69. Re: Railway “proposals” ( & public transport generally ) from the so-called “taxpayers alliance” …
    As Graham says they are both economically & geographically illiterate, but there is a significant overlap with another lobbying group, who are even further away from reality – the “Institute of Economic Affairs” – with whom some of us are unfortunately familiar.

  70. Re Mr Morgan,

    A good number of those schemes have been plucked from comments under old LR articles and other specialist websites so should be taken with lorry load of salt. Many actually cost more or substantially reduce the BCR.

    Indeed many were dissected in comments under the previous CR2 article when the the TA report came out came out.

  71. Looks like they’ve used every colour crayon in the box, scribbling all over the plans. A blatant attempt to muddy the water, if that isn’t a clash of metaphors. Of course there may be a rational alternative of splitting the scheme into two (or three) separate, more affordable lines, so that one, at least, could be started before we’re all dead. I know it is possible to kill two birds with one stone, but sometimes CR2 looks like it is trying to kill a dozen birds with that same throw. If it’s a choice between getting a smaller project approved, or a big one rejected, what’s the logical choice?
    Thankfully it’s not me who decides which project goes forth – the Chelney line as was? Doubling the Anglia tracks to the City? Tooting to the City and Docklands?

  72. One thing I don’t understand, why is Tottenham Court Road the West End stop and not Bond Street? Surely Bond Street is closer to the the critical mass of Oxford Street? Whilst the Tottenham Court Road side generally lacks the large shops.

    Also, could somebody explain why there is no room underneath Piccadilly Circus for a CR2 station? I seem to recall vaugely when I was a child watching a programme that revealed there was a massive underground substation beneath Piccadilly, although since it was over 20 years ago my memory might not be trustworthy. I should Google it.

    Regardless, I would have thought a station in the St. James/Trafalgar Square/St Martins area would attract considerable useage from Covent Garden/Leicester Square and the Pall Mall offices.

  74. @Alex McKenna: Luckily it appears that they used the London Connections map for their Crayonism. Otherwise you would never propose Fenchurch St. to Elephant and castle via Cannon Street…. Especially not via existing rail links!

  75. @Thatcher why is Tottenham Court Road the West End stop ?

    It’s more a CR1 interchange than a stop, from mid-town you can split the demand headed to the city and West End.

    How long ago was JB interviewed? That commentary was from some 5 months ago.

  76. Re Margret T,

    Connection with Northern Line? There is more than just shops as destinations and Bond Street is still a CR west end station.

    Piccadilly Circus CR2 station – There isn’t the space, it can’t handle the passenger volumes and the platforms would be ~100m away from the TCR CR2 station platforms with a stupidly tight curve between the 2, with the 2 stations and bend combination limiting the overall capacity/frequency of the line.

    The southern entrance for TCR CR2 is only half way along Shaftesbury Avenue.

  77. @NGH – the lure of Piccadilly is the direct consequence of being seduced by TCR in the first place. Close one’s ears to the blandishments of TCR, and more southerly or northerly (and better) routeings become possible.

  78. @Graham H: The Strand would be a good location, although that might require some re-drilling of existing tunnels…

  79. @SHLR – Get Thee behind me, Crayonista” – actually, I agree – if ever you were to build a SW-City- GE version of CR2, somewhere in the CX/Strand area would be a logical choice for an intermediate stop before the City, paticularly if there were few if any, legacy services from the Inners into Waterloo (another issue with CR2 in its present form.)

  80. M Thatcher: The massive substation is actually below Leicester Square – the ticket shop on the South side is it’s air vent.

  81. @Graham H very much agree. Any strategic ambition that falls vaguely into a NE-SW corridor seems to have been over the years lumped into this one mega scheme, with the consequence that it has to accept some compromises. Surely the survival, and need to accommodate, remnant services from both SW inners and Lee Valley services that miss proposed portal sites is a massive draw back, and will ultimately lead to their withering in the long term as other demands for capacity once again start eating into Waterloo and Liverpool Street? The idea of having two schemes, separately satisfying NR aspirations for a RER type connexion, and a LUL type metro, seems more convincing in meeting requirements directly without compromise. However, the need to build anything, and the cost of whatever, is now so great it seems a more sophisticated proposal isn’t relevant. Which is a shame, as tomorrow’s compromises will have to last indefinitely if funding continues to become tighter and costs balloon.

  82. @ben 🙂 One further issue in the mix is the limitations on Underground station capacity in the CAZ. These have been fairly thoroughly aired here already, but they are not a standalone matter – adding more stations to existing lines becomes selfdefeating in capacity terms. Logically, one is driven to new lines with new stations to spread the load. CR2 doesn’t do that within the CAZ.

    I would also like to draw attention to what might be described as an “either/ or” view about the SW Inners, where CR2 is substituted for some/all of existing SW services. This isn’t just a matter of legacy services. There are good capacity arguments for building new tube lines that complement the existing SW Inner network rather than divert existing SW services elsewhere. The Piccadilly and District are already a case in point, and Hackney-Chelsea provides an obvious platform for extensions (as has been suggested quite frequently in the past: eg Roehampton-Kingston). Intensifying the existing SW services to exploit the CAZ capacity generated on CR2 is virtually impossible with the current plans because of (a) the choice of portal, and (b) the plethora of level crossings around the network. So, yet another way in which CR2 neither addresses an already identified problem, nor offers a useful solution.

  83. @Graham H
    “the plethora of level crossings around the (SWR) network. ”

    Particularly on the Windsor Lines – there are four between Barnes and Richmond – although the SWML itself is not so afflicted: none until Totton, I think.

    Looking at the disruption caused by the elimination of the crossing at Feltham, which is relatively easy as it “merely” involves widening an existing bridge at the other end of the station, but is nevertheless closing both roads for nearly a year, one can see why it is not easy to replace a level crossing in a built up area.

  84. @Timbeau

    First SWML level crossing is Mount Pleasant Road, a short distance south of St Denys station.

  85. @timbeau /Kit Green – the issues about the SW outers are, as you imply, rather different. Whether you see Waterloo as the home of just the Outers depends, in my humble view, on how you plan the inners. I agree that the level crossings on the inners are a nightmare, which is why I suspect the long term solution to capacity is to build new LU lines.

  86. On the SW suburban routes we have the following level crossings:

    – Between Clapham Jn and Feltham via Richmond: 4
    – Between Clapham Jn and Feltham via Hounslow: 3
    – Between Feltham and Staines: 2x User Worked Crossings (UWC)
    – Between Staines and Virginia Water: 2 + 1x UWC
    – Between Staines and Windsor & Eton Riverside: 2

    – Between New Malden and Twickenham (Kingston Loop): 2
    – Between Strawberry Hill/Teddington and Shepperton: 1
    – Between Hampton Court Jn and Hampton Court: 1

    – Between Raynes Park and Epsom: 2
    – Between Worcester Park and Chessington South: 0

    It would therefore be very difficult to provide a high-frequency service (e.g. as on Crossrail 1 – every 5 minutes per branch) on the Windsor Lines, whereas increasing frequencies on any other branch would also increase down times at a number of level crossings.

    I’m not sure the answer to capacity in the SW area is to build new LU lines – I’d argue the answer could be in removing level crossings. However, this shouldn’t just be about building new road overbridges, but also altering the rail alignments, putting them in tunnels and such like; and rerouting them to improve the efficiency of service and the number of people served. Tunnelling along existing alignments could also free up a bit of land for those all-important blocks of flats!

    As an example: imagine putting Barnes to Richmond underground, including the LUL bit (which would have to be rationalised in terms of numbers of platforms). The value of land freed up by building over Richmond station would probably pay for half of that scheme.

  87. @Straphan – Could be, although by the time you have buried the existing network and some of its stations, you’d probably find not much difference between the costs. Probably the other main arguments for doing something altogether new are (a) you can then serve new areas, and (b) it’s then easier to link with any attempt to provide a new. tube route across the central area.

    I agree with you, though, about not trying to replace the existing LXs with overbridges generally; I’m not sure what the Highways manual prescribes as the maximum gradient for bridge approaches is these days, but let’s say it’s 1:20, which implies starting the overbridge about 120m back on each side. Given the way in which the building line is close to the railway in most LX locations, the implication is that you would have a property take equivalent to about 40-50 houses in terms of lost access.

  88. I have made the point before, but Melbourne, Australia shows the way with level crossings, albeit in suburbs that are less densely developed than in London. See https://levelcrossings.vic.gov.au/

    In the interest of affordability and buildability, you could keep the existing railway on the Windsor line, with just the stopping trains on the surface, and provide quadruple track west of Barnes by providing a tunnel for the fast trains, starting somewhere between Putney and Barnes. If lines came to the surface east of Richmond the four busiest level crossings are avoided and no underground stations are needed. However, it would be desirable to have four tracks at least as far as the junction at Twickenham and to design the scheme to allow all four tracks to be underground at a future date.

  89. @Graham H: If the business case for burying the existing railway includes a doubling of the frequency of service, then the business case probably won’t look too terrible, even if you tack on the electricity supply upgrade necessary to increase said frequencies.

    @Londoner in Scotland: it is true that stations are the most expensive aspect of any underground railway. However, bear in mind fast trains through the area already stop at Richmond, and I believe the good people of Richmond would like it to stay that way…

    Two places with a busy suburban railway full of level crossings that spring to my mind are Melbourne and Buenos Aires. Both cities have chosen to build grade-separated solutions that go above ground level (either viaducts on roads or long flyovers for trains, which eliminate a few level crossings in one go). In London, where property prices are sacred, they would no doubt have the mayor of any local authority that would approve planning permission for such a project burned at the stake.

  90. @Straphan and others
    Re: Barnes to Twickenham
    I think the idea of burying the Barnes to Richmond (at least) stretch has a few things going for it – much of the route runs alongside parks, roads or allotments, and the Richmond Homebase would make for a suitable worksite.
    Although there would be some local resistance to temporarily co-opting the adjacent areas for construction, the attraction of eventually burying the railway underground and losing the level crossings might be adequate compensation for most, especially if the land gained by burying the railway is in part used for extending the parks and allotments. Other parts may also be suitable for developments to help fund the scheme.
    Burying 4 tracks would also allow a better service at new intermediate sub-surface stations to replace North Sheen and Mortlake, which could be slightly better located too.

    Of course, how you’d compensate for the disruption to the rail service in the 2+ years it would take to construct all this is a different matter, and that’s the bit, notwithstanding cost, that probably means it’ll never happen.

  91. Paul – you write that the disruption to the rail service for over two years would mean that this will never happen.

    Look across the North Sea at how the Dutch managed to keep their railway running while they put the line between Den Haag HS and Schiedam underground – in two stages through, first, Rijswijk, and then Delft. They now have a four-track railway all the way from Den Haag to Schiedam, apart from the “easy” bit from Delft Zuid to Schiedam.

    The Dutch were working in sand throughout, a medium in which they have some experience.

  92. @JOHNMF: I think “sand” is perhaps a tad optimistic for the ground conditions in that area. A goopy, peaty, muddy mess held together by water is perhaps a better term.

    A lot of projects in the Netherlands involve pumping large quantities of proper sand into the right place to provide a decent base to work on.

  93. Instead of sinking the existing railway between Barnes and Richmond on the same alignment, a new pair of tunnelled fast tracks could be far more useful to allow overtaking and possibly be cheaper and less disruptive to build. At the Richmond end, the ramp and portal would be at the aforementioned Homebase site. At the Barnes end, the middle island and tracks of the four platform station might be removed to make way for a fast pair ramp and portal. There may be an opportunity to place an intermediate shaft at the Mortlake Stag Brewery development site, which would help define the route of the tunnel. The new tunnel would take all the fast trains, the Readings, Windsors and any future airport expresses that stop first at Richmond after Clapham Junction, while the regular interval inner suburban stopping service would remain on the surface using the existing stations. It is the mix of traffic today, with fasts catching up stopping trains and roads closed as early as possible for fasts, that leads to the extended closure times that are so controversial. A short closure every 5 to 10 minutes or so would likely be far more acceptable to locals. In the Egham area, the Heathrow Southern project aims to route it’s new services via a new tunnelled route under the town to avoid the Egham crossings. It might also be possible to route SWR Waterloo – Reading services via such a tunnel to completely remove rail traffic from the surface through Egham. This would require suitable additional connections to get between Staines and Virginia Water. The existing rail route between these stations could be abandoned and converted to a high quality active transport corridor including the bridge over the Thames. A new Egham station would be required and would be sunken somewhere near the M25 bridge over the existing railway, probably constructed in an open trench to avoid being classified as underground. Staines station might be reconstructed a little closer to the High Street bridge, incorporating a third platform for terminating Elizabeth trains from Heathrow T5. Crayons put away again…

  94. @ Mark T

    “A short closure every 5 to 10 minutes or so would likely be far more acceptable to locals. ”

    But it wouldn’t be every 5 to 10 minutes if, as the original premise suggested, we want to run Crossrail frequencies. A train every five minutes in each direction means 24 an hour, and although some of those would coincide it would not be possible to do so at all four crossings.

    The off peak frequency on that stretch is 8 tph in each direction (two Reading, two Windsor, two Kingston loop, two Hounslow loop) so roughly a closure every four minutes, although they tend to merge into each other. The longest closures are in fact for “up” at Mortlake, and “down” ones at North Sheen, as the crossings are immediately after the platform end and thus within the overlap of their platform starting signals.

  95. Is there any scope to move one of the platforms at Mortlake and North Sheen, to match the layout created for Mitcham Eastfields – the level crossing here is ‘behind’ the train in both directions, so the barriers can be raised as soon as the train stops in the platform.

  96. No : at North Sheen there is housing on the south side of the line west of the crossing. Moreover, such a platform would extend almost halfway to the platform end at Richmond.

    East of the Mortlake crossing there is a road running right next to the railway on both sides.

  97. I think any scheme to significantly improve the route West of Barnes would have to incorporate Level Crossing removal as a benefit from both a safety and local community perspective. It wouldn’t be credible to do anything major without that.

  98. All this stuff about tunnelling from Richmond to Barnes is fascinating crayoning.

    Tunnels are expensive. Tunnelled stations are very expensive. It would be the wrong side of £1.5bn to tunnel this route and provide stations at North Sheen and Mortlake. The land it releases would be worth, at most, about 5% of that, and that assumes you could build lots of narrow tower blocks, with little or no road access.

    As an aside the ‘Homebase’ site is nowhere near big enough for a portal. Look at Royal Oak or Pudding Mill Lane for comparison. There is also the small matter of dropping in a TBM or two and then shifting 10,000 tonnes of material in and out every day during construction.

    By far the cheapest, easiest, and lowest community impact solution for the level crossings (assuming vehicular traffic must continue to be accommodated) is to build bridges over the railway. But even that remains very unlikely in this stretch.

  99. @Sad Fat Dad – one can but agree. Some problems are not worth the cost of their solution and one just has to live with them. It’s the prime reason I suggest building relief lines elsewhere in the corridor.

  100. While that TPA report is a lot of fun, and I can’t help but laugh at the cost estimates for some of the proposed alternative tube lines.

    I can’t quite dismiss their other options for a slimmed down Crossrail 2. Such as an express tunnel for Wimbledon and keeping it via Earlsfield and also pushing the line closer to Northern half of the City. If it did that, then Crossrail 2 would serve far more central London destinations that are also places existing commuters on the South West Mainline already go to, far fewer would need to change onto Crossrail 1 (if the interchange was kept at Tottenham court road).

    If they tweaked the option via Piccadilly to Charing Cross and City Thameslink and then Old Street, then it would take a lot of passengers out of Waterloo and off the Waterloo and City and Northern Lines.

  101. @SFD.

    Building bridges over the railway (or underpasses under it) at Mortlake, White Hart Lane and North Sheen would hardly be a low-community-impact solution, given that the streets approaching the crossings have house or shop frontages very close to the road. Access to these properties would be nigh-impossible if the road were to be elevated or sunk relative to their front doors by fifteen to twenty feet.

  102. @Timbeau – 15 August 2019 at 07:34
    My premise is to divert at least half of the current service between Barnes and Richmond via the new fast tunnel(s). A level crossing in the overlap of a platform starter does not have to be closed and locked while a stopping train arrives at the station, but many ARE locked in the however due to risk assessment admittedly. The mix of fast and stopping trains is part of the problem on this section as you’ve often got a fast train catching up a stopper so you can’t realistically lift the barriers after the stopper, then there’s one coming the other way, etc, etc. If only six to eight stopping trains per hour were routed over the crossings, there would undoubtedly be larger gaps between closures, and shorter closures. With only stopping trains running on the surface it might be possible to replace the current MCB crossings with the latest style of Automatic Full Barrier Crossing – Locally monitored (AFBCL). This has a much shorter road warning time than current MCBs, similar to other locally monitored automatic crossings such as AOCL and ABCL, while retaining the safety of full barriers and adding an obstacle detection capability. Crossing clear is observed by the driver on approach and correct operation and OD clear is conveyed by means of a flashing red/white light for the driver, just as at a ABCL. Speed on approach must be limited necessarily however, due to a need to be able to stop in time if the crossing is not seen to be clear or functioning correctly, and an absolute maximum of 55mph is possible under the best approach sighting conditions. For stopping trains on the corridor, this should not be a major problem and fast trains would bypass all the crossings via the new fast line tunnel anyway. Where a crossing is immediately ahead of a station stop, the crossing sequence in that direction can be initiated by train crew operating a platform button. This scheme could provide many more fast paths via the new tunnel while also allowing an increase in local stopping services, yet reducing road closure time. Tunnelling would be confined to new fast tracks with no new platforms required underground.

    @SFD 16 August 2019 at 21:28
    The Homebase site alone is too small I agree. If parts of the Sainsburys car park and filling station was also included, with the ramp/portal entending under Manor Road, then a total length of around 500m might be possible, which is in the same ball park, for total ramp and TBM launch pit length, as the CR1 examples you cite.

  103. @MT – I thought the idea of CR2 was a more frequent service, which would take up any time (and possibly more) released by the move to AFBCLs. If not, what is its point?

    More generally, the discussion so far reveals that there are no cheap options for dealing with the LX problem. As timbeau implies, any overbridge is going to take away something like 40-50 houses/shops before you start counting the cost of construction. Some interesting read-across to the current conversation on the centre of Hammersmith…

  105. Why not put the railway (and stations) from Barnes to Richmond on a viaduct – no land take and relatively cheap and undeneath can be a linear park.

  106. I worked for a while in Richmond and lived not far from North Sheen station and know the area reasonably.
    Reading all these ideas leads me to the following thought: Are you all aware of the local demographic? If any of these proposals came to life, I’m sure someone will happily pay for someone to point out the holes in all these schemes and further hire cunning lawyers to stop them.
    Nobody’s going to be digging any big holes or build (*heavy coughing*) a viaduct. Little holes perhaps? Mm?

  107. @Timbeau, I agree that it wouldn’t be a low community impact to build overbridges. However I strongly suspect it would be lower than any other option, particularly those options building tunnels viaducts, or new property in the solum of the existing line.

    Graham H is right – it is quite conceivable that a bridge might need the acquisition of 40-50 properties. Whilst this would (obviously) cause local opposition from the occupiers of the properties, and presumably others in the close vicinity, this is by its nature localised. It may well be possible to have (say) only 2 bridges to close the 4 level crossings.

    Compare that to the opposition likely if the land released was going to built on either with flats or a 3 mile viaduct commanding excellent views into the bathrooms of hundreds of properties.

    There is also the impact to consider on the operation of the railway – especially given that a good proportion of residents of the areas are also railway customers. Road bridges would have relatively little impact on the railway operation. Any other option (other than bored tunnel) would be difficult to do on line without closing the railway for extended periods measured in years.

    Graham H is also right – there’s no easy answer and in this instance it may well be the best option to leave as is.

    In any event it’s all irrelevant, Crossrail 2 isn’t going to Richmond!

  108. @SAD FAT DAD 18 August 2019 at 17:21
    On the Windsors there is a mix of stopping and fast services. That represents a major constraint to adopting tube style frequencies which typically require a standard stopping pattern. Improvements on this segment are more relevant to Heathrow airport service than Crossrail 2, which I agree under any plausible scenario is very unlikely to serve Richmond! In Airtrack days there were suggestions of introducing skip-stop patterns between Barnes and Richmond so all trains could cover the distance in a very similar time, but it would then have become practically impossible to travel between certain pairs of adjacent stations without a double-back.

  109. @Roger
    a bored tunnel can be built without disturbing the existing line above it, except when it comes to tying in the portals at each end. Building a viaduct above the line would require closure of the existing line for the duration of the project.

    @SFD

    “a bridge might need the acquisition of 40-50 properties. Whilst this would (obviously) cause local opposition from the occupiers of the properties, and presumably others in the close vicinity, this is by its nature localised. ”

    One of the reasons the proposal to have a Crossrail 1 branch via tunnel from Royal Oak to Shepherds Bush and Turnham Green, then over existing tracks via Richmond to Kingston, was scuppered was local opposition to the flying junction that would have been required east of Richmond station. Number of properties affected? Two.

    It might be possible to eliminate the North Sheen crossing by diverting the railway to run parallel with the District Line and then curve back across the Sainsburys site. This would allow the road to be carried over the railway adjacent to the existing bridge over the District Line.

  110. Very slight crayoning alert…

    Firstly the facts: The Manual for Streets 2 uses 8% (1 in 12.5) as the maximum acceptable gradient for new roads. Either under or over the railway needs around 6m of height difference at most, so ~75m approach ramps. I think going under the railway would be better aesthetically for the properties which overlook the sites

    Manor Road is not so bad, if the Homebase site could be altered then it should be possible to build an approach ramp without the loss of any properties. Then on the south side around 10 houses would need removing on the western side.

    At Mortlake, again not so bad, if a little bit of the green could be sacrificed then nothing needs demolishing, on the south side it would mean losing a few commercial properties.

    At Vine Road, something like limited clearance road bridges (~3m high) could be provided, as it’s not a bus route and there is a nearby alternative.

    As for White Hart Lane though, that one seems insoluble other than moving the railway up/down

    Of course, I’m sure there are perfectly good reasons I have overlooked for why it’s nothing like as simple as my suggestions

  111. @Herned

    There are road junctions within 75m of all of those level crossings, which would be blocked off by the proposed approach ramps. How would you deal with them?

  112. Timbeau
    Re. Road junctions close to LC’s …
    There are two level crossings which NR would love to get rid of – they are a p.i.t.a. – but they cannot, because there are locally-major junctions immediately adjacent to the railway.
    At the S end of Higham’s Park station on the Chingford branch like this … and at Wokingham .. like this
    Any solutions, on the back of a postcard to NR, please?

  113. @ Timbeau

    At North Sheen there would be room to put a single lane one way loop around the top of the tunnel, a bit like
    this example from Italy.

    At Mortlake the road could be offline so there would be space for access roads to the east.

    For vine road, if it was possible/legal to build a limited height underpass then the access ramps would be short enough to avoid any issues, the access to the sports ground would just need to slope down a bit, and one of the level crossings left in place for anything larger, only accessible with permission from the signallers

    https://goo.gl/maps/kN27Bh4H4kFpj5bf6

  114. @Herned – Somewhat more than 6m clearance, I fear, given the need to construct future bridges to clear OHLE kit. Then there is the thickness of the bridge deck itself. 8m is more plausible. There is also the need to avoid too sharp a transition from the approach gradient to the level bridge deck, to avoid grounding.

  115. You could probably get local support for just closing the roads to motor traffic. A cycle/pedestrian bridge underpass could easily be accommodated.

  116. @ Bob

    “You could probably get local support ”

    It depends how local – the people actually living on those roads might be willing to have the roads closed, but these four crossings are the only way across the railway for three miles between Barnes and Richmond apart from Clifford Avenue (the South Circular Road) which is a single carriageway and heavily congested already. Without the Manor Road (North Sheen) crossing in particular, any traffic from south of the railway (not only in Richmond, but Kingston, Wimbledon etc as well) heading for Kew Bridge or Chiswick Bridge would have to divert through the centre of Richmond.

    Looking at the NLS website, it would appear Clifford Avenue did not exist until about 1900, and was built as a bridge from the outset, probably contemporary with the local houses. The other crossings are much older.
    I am sure if there were a solution, someone would have done it by now.

  117. @ Timbeau

    You are probably right, but has the situation ever been properly looked at? I would imagine there has always been something more important to spend money on, especially as it’s been a bigger problem for the local residents than the railway

  118. When TfL consulted on the P5 route extension they only got replies from people who live near the junction that would be (re)opened.

    Half the art in getting the right answer is knowing who to ask!

  119. Greg Tingey @ 19 August 2019 at 08:34

    “Re. Road junctions close to LC’s …
    At the S end of Higham’s Park station on the Chingford branch like this … and at Wokingham .. like this”

    A viaduct was constructed to the replace level crossing at George Lane in South Woodford when the Central line was extended. Nothing like that much room at Highams Park, and only 4 trains per hour each way.

  120. Alan G
    ONE: That was then – i.e. the late 1930’s in the planning stage & (I think) 21/11/1948 for electric traction.
    TWO: Only 4tph under the LNER service – slightly more for the Central Line, even in 1948, never mind now.

    Oh & three – I’m very familiar with that flyover, and (using Bing maps + NLS maps) 14 properties were demolished to construct the bridge ….. ( Unless some were already WWII casualties, of course.)

    Try that now!

  121. Addendum
    The *cough* “obvious” solution to the LC-problem along the Richmond line is to close the LC’s to powered vehicles & build one adequate bridge … at a suitable point.
    Which raises the question – where is that “suitable point” & where do you put the approach roads to it?
    And, I think, you are then back to square one!

    I suspect that, unless real compensation is proposed ( i.e. current market value + 10% + moving costs. ) that isn’t going to work either, even though it is probably the cheapest solution.

  122. Further to Alan Griffiths’ and Greg’s inputs, the Central Line extension was planned to open in 1940, but Poland was invaded in September 1939. This caused urgent cancellation by LPTB of further construction work, with the cessation then rescinded as the Phoney War emerged. This state of affairs lasted until the April/May 1940 crisis, with works resumed on an essentials-not-frills basis.

    However the damage had been done with the consequential delays in Autumn 1939. The end of the Phoney War meant that the Central Line scheme could not be completed quickly – unlike the Northern Line extension which opened on 14 April 1940 from East Finchley to High Barnet, five days after Germany invaded Denmark. The following month the western front ceased being phoney. Materials and labour were then needed for far more urgent purposes. Indeed much trackage was removed for use elsewhere, eg from the Central Line Greenford extension.

    However the NE London level crossing works had mostly been done by August 1939. The London Passenger Transport group authored an article on the subject in the 1980s.

    As Greg indicates, willingness to accommodate such changes to local residential land use has diminished markedly since then. Try this NLS geo-referenced link to see South Woodford in the 1890s and now, and the scale of demolition involved. https://maps.nls.uk/geo/explore/#zoom=17&lat=51.5932&lon=0.0261&layers=6&b=1

    The proposed CR2 alignments would encounter level crossings on the Lee Valley main line, and on the Epsom and Kingston routes, so the topic principles are relevant even if CR2 isn’t meant to go along the Windsor lines.

  123. Greg, Jonathan Roberts

    At a briefing on Crossrail 2 a few years ago (sadly never written up) I came away with the feeling that Crossrail 2 was about tunnels (and their route), stations and level crossings.

    Do not underestimate how critical level crossings are to the Crossrail 2 project with the need to address some that would otherwise remain in the ‘too hard’ category. Whilst not of the same order of magnitude as station or tunnel works, it is level crossings (and their necessary abolition) that is likely to generate the most protest and the most need for extensive works of various diverse nature well beyond the boundary of where the Crossrail works take place.

    Also be aware this is not just an issue for south-west London though that is where the most difficult issues lie. It also affects the route to Broxbourne.

    The good news is that one level crossing has already been dealt with – that which was at Northumberland Park. But that one of the easier ones yet eliminating even that was a fairly major undertaking that was only really possible because of redevelopment of the area.

  124. PoP
    IIRC the LC’s in the Enfield area on the Lea Valley line can be dealt with … that at Ponders End went long ago, leaving those at Brimsdown – do-able (IMHO) & Enfield Lock – which could be much more of a problem.
    I believe a bridge is (already) proposed for Chesunt?

  125. Going back to the financing/benefits and working like a mortgage, I think that is a bit misleading. A lot of the benefits of transport improvements are notional socio-economic benefits, they aren’t an income to pay off the loan, especially if they are things like environmental benefits. But you can try to turn a proportion of those benefits into money by some method. Such methods are generally only partial and approximate, so you usually can only convert a proportion of benefits.

    To take an example, an improved railway service will attract passengers. Passenger improvements are often a large proportion of the socio-economic benefits. But turning that into money is far from straightforward and very leaky. You can’t locate an individual passenger and say “you’ve done really well out of this, you’d pay us quite a lot if you had to”. Crossrail 1 was only forecast to produce about £2bn in farebox improvement to contribute to the (original) £15bn cost (that’s probably an npv in some price base of some time ago.) That would be only from demand growth, as no one was suggesting that the Crossrail should have a special higher fares to reflect the improved service. Higher fares was done for the Kent high speed local service, but it is not so common. TfL has standard fare systems and doesn’t usually depart from them.

    If a scheme is really impactful locally – as Crossrail is and so was the Jubilee Line extension – then a fair proportion of those socio-economic benefits produce local property value increases. It is better to get the money out of passengers because they are the direct beneficiaries, but when that can’t be done, or not very completely, we can go after their houses! In doing so, we will inevitably do it for people who use the railway more or less, though their property value will be the same whatever they do. So, as was done in particular for the JLE, you can seek to tax those properties. This is again a rather leaky method. First, the property effect will be scattered, and you can only realistically do this for closely defined areas where a large effect is felt. And also a tax rate that tries to take a high proportion is probably not feasible. This was done for the JLE and that was ultimately the largest single source of money for funding the JLE. But the government still had to put its hand in its pocket.

    The Northern Line extension is a rare case where it has been fully funded by developers and local tax schemes (assuming costs don’t badly overrun) that reflect the local benefits of the scheme. For that to have worked, it must be creating benefits of a scale much beyond its costs for such funding to have been collected by such leaky methods.

  126. Between Tottenham Hale and Broxbourne we’ve got (south to north):

    – Brimsdown
    – Enfield Lock
    – Trinity Lane (MCG, with footbridge provided)
    – Windmill Lane (Cheshunt)
    – Cadmore Lane (UWG)
    – Slipe Lane (UWC)
    – Wharf Road

    This gives us three major crossings (Brimsdown, Enfield Lock, Windmill Lane) to get rid of, alongside a few more minor ones.

    Northumberland Park was relatively easy to get rid of as there is a bridge (Leeside Road) only about half a mile away. But the nearest alternative vehicle crossings for Brimsdown (A110 Lea Valley Road), Enfield Lock (A1055 Mollison Avenue), and Windmill Lane (A121 Monarchs Way) are all well over 1 mile away.

  127. @Ivan – I don’t think CBA calculations work quite like that. There will be user benefits which cannot be captured through the farebox – time savings for example – and non-user benefits which only rarely can be captured through the farebox. These non-fares income benefits are appraised in a similar “currency” for the sake of comparability, but don’t necessarily have to be expressed in cash. In addition, because all schemes west of GosPlanland have to be paid for, there will be a cash based business case. And because we usually rely on funds generated outside the business, there will be a funding case based on the cost of money. It is essential to have all three types of cases pointing in the same direction – there are many very attractive projects in CBA terms that are wholly unfundable for example, and there are eve.n one or two cases which work in business and funding terms which have no (or very little) economic benefits

  128. Sorry if I was hard hard to understand. I was not talking, except in passing, about how CBA calculations work (which as a practioner I know in detail). I was specifically trying to take the discussion on further from just what you say.

    You assert various benefits “cannot be captured…”. But what I was specifically trying to talk about is that there are methods. You can’t get it all, but you can get more. You can change the fare scheme to get more through the farebox, though that is often a politically difficult. And if we are capturing income by changing the fare scheme, we need to be sure that our original CBA was consistent with that. Putting the fares up will typically reduce a cost-benefit case. But needs must sometimes. One criticism of the current system of funding franchisees to make improvements is that the CBA is usually done on the assumption of an unchanged fare scheme; but the rail franchisee has discretion to change fares, regardless of whether this is consistent with delivering the benefits that justified the funding.

    You talk about “funds generated outside the business”. Let us recognise that a lot of the remaining uncaptured benefits are manifest as property value changes. You are maybe calling this funding from “outside the business”. But we view “the business” more widely – a transport scheme delivering value to surrounding properties, then it is within the business, the question is how we achieve that monetarily. In other countries, railway companies are much more active property owners and developers, to capture more of those benefits truly within the business. They own the land, then make the transport development adjacent, and the value increase is literally on their balance sheet. They can either sell it of like that, or actively develop it themselves if they have those skills. Half of the income of Japanese railway companies comes this way. They are big on it in the Netherlands. Even if the railway doesn’t own the property, it is just the same effect, just the same property value uplift, and the question is how the railway can turn the value it delivered to its neighbours into money in its pocket. In many ways, that is just what transport schemes are for.

    Since farebox is such a weak method of getting the benefits, the property value uplift is where most of the funding will come from, because that is where the value is. But we need to have methods to address it. The Northern Line extension is being 100% funded by such methods. This is made easier by the fact that there are particularly large and profitable developments adjacent to the stations, and they are putting up large sums. But that is less than half of it. More money is coming through more generic methods of taxing the value of the development schemes in the area of the stations, run by the local councils. The largest amount of money is coming from a TIF scheme for which there is a useful Wikipedia article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_increment_financing
    This is a method that is common in the US but has rather lost its shine of late, probably through over-aggressive use of it (rather like there is nothing generically wrong with PFI, it is the over-aggressive misuse of it that gave it a bad reputation).

    Yes, if the funding comes late then there is a cost of money issue as finance may be needed to bridge the gap. The Northern Line extension TIF is a 25 year scheme, so there is financing of up to 25 years. If you look at Crossrail, they were very canny in getting a lot of the money in early, and thus the proportion to be financed over the construction period was quite small as a proportion of total costs – until it overran. That’s why a £2 to 3bn overrun on Crossrail was so very nasty, even though by the standards of large complex projects it is quite a modest overrun. They set out in detail the funding and how it has changed with overrun on the Crossrail website.

  129. @Ivan – although there are these theoretical options for raising more cash, the practicalities often prevent it. For example, with a zonal fares structure it is difficult to demonstrate that, say, a new station will actually generate new business rather than divert existing punters . This made life very difficult for developers trying to promote a new station at the users’ expense. Cricklewood New springs to mind. As to property taxation, for some reason, in the UK, politicians have tended to prefer deals to general taxation. Whether this is efficient is for discussion.

    We might disagree with PFI’s usefulness outside the world of economic theory, but that is really a separate discussion.

  130. @ Straphan: Cadmore Lane has long since ‘ceased to be’ a Level Crossing; a bridge went up a couple of years ago and the crossing is closed. Similarly at Slipe Lane.

    A bridge has also gone up at Trinity Lane, but the crossing remains open for vehicular access to the allotments, as does the crossing keeper who controls it (who presumably reads a lot of books).

    @Greg: no proposals for bridging Cheshunt (Windmill Lane), other than for Crossrail 2. Interestingly, Broxbourne Council have recently granted planning consent for 1600+ dwellings on the ex Tesco site immediately north west of the crossing, with no provision for a bridge.

  131. SFD
    That’s odd ….
    I used to drive up to (but not across) that x-ing @ Chesunt a year or two back & I was told that there were proposals to do away with it …
    Presumably local supposed “plans” that hadn’t even got to GRIP 1 then. Oh well ….
    Those 1600+ dwellings being built will/should/may change that?
    Given that there are 11 or 12 Up trains in the AM peak across that position, never mind Down trains, I can see mass protests, unless the railway & town planners actually start talking to each other ….

  132. Here i would like to raise my concerns on how much alignment, coordination and long term plans exist between HS2 and Crossrail (1 and 2)?. As all these three projects are of larger size and takes all our money to complete this project (say at end of 2033, if no further delays), but after this long wait how sensible and good connectivity links to entire London and Outer London we could still get shall be an serious question to be raised atleast now, though its not too late?.

    As per the current proposal, there are plans to extend as follows: Crossrail-1 to Old Oak common, HS2 to Euston and Crossrail-2 to Euston. But surprisingly we still do not have common interchange station where all three trains could meet, and all these proposed plans either make very much congested at Euston or require commuters to still have several interchanges before they can reach their final destination and thereby this is not going to reduce any commute time.

    Now another serious concern has been raised whether can we terminate HS2 at Old Oak common to avoid delaying HS2 project completion by another seven years and also this involves several millions if need to extend to Euston.

    So, best way, is stop HS2 at Old Oak Common and also to make both Crossrail 1/2 meet at Old Oak common station and spend that savings to improve new infrastructure needs at Old Oak Common.

  133. @Rag K CR2 – as presently planned – has nothing to do with OOC, which it misses by many miles. Bringing all three schemes together at OOC would remove entirely the justification for CR2, which is about relieving SWR services. Each of the three schemes interchanges with the other (Euston/OOC/TCR) and there is no special merit in making all three interchange with each other at the same place – anyone wishing to interchange would move between two lines, not three.

  134. There is a very good reason not to have everything meeting at the same point, because it introduces a “single point of failure” which, if something were to close down the station, would prevent any interchange between the three lines. For the same reason I have long advocated that XR2 should not serve Euston Cross, but should interchange with the lines served by that complex elsewhere, thus relieving the crowding there by allowing people who don’t actually want to to go that area alternative interchange stations. For example a route via Angel, Mount Pleasant, Russell Square/Goodge Street, Marble Arch, Knightsbridge and Sloane Square. atbypass

  135. @timbeau – in a rare access of crayonism, I wouldn’t disagree with your suggestion, though I might make it travel somewhat south of that, with stations in Fitzrovia, Bond Street and Mayfair, partly to serve new areas that are somewhat distant from a tube, and partly to relieve thereby the pressure on existing stations. One can but hope that when CR2 collapses, a more rational analysis of the issues surrounding (a) the overloading of SW services, and (b) the problem of CAZ stations being close to capacity is addressed more logically.

  136. Getting TBMs from China instead of EU for fraction of costs greatly enhance effectiveness & simplicity of planning! At £26m each instead of £1.7bn charged in total for Eurotunnel could enable effective implementation! I had 4x4hr interviews to be senior PM at Crossrail, getting short listed. Instead attracting Clinton leeks and Graham Plant among others to my project! Raising the full finance from several means backed by KPMG.

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