Andy Byford points out the cathedral-like ceiling, the crystal-clear acoustics, the “pureness of the aesthetic” that surrounds him. The head of London’s public transport system is rhapsodizing about a subway station that is part of a new line he says will be “the envy of the world” – not least to travellers who will have a speedier link to LHR ¬– when it opens May 24.
“It really gives people a sense of grandeur, but there is also a sense of calm,” said Byford as he showed journalists around Liverpool Street Station on London’s gleaming new east-west Elizabeth Line.
The CDN$30 billion mixed overground and underground railway, named in honour of Queen Elizabeth II, is three-and-a-half years late and $6.3 billion over budget, but Byford says it will be “a game-changer” for Britain’s pandemic-scarred capital city.
“I think when it opens it is going to be a huge morale boost for London, post-COVID,” said Byford, the former Toronto Transit Commission chief who is now commissioner of Transport for London. “What could be a greater symbol of London’s emergence from COVID than this spectacular railway?”
Ground was first broken on the project – also known as Crossrail – in 2009 and has been Britain’s biggest infrastructure project for decades. The new line involved digging 42 km of new tunnels under Europe’s biggest city – uncovering 68,000-year-old mammoth bones, Roman ruins, and the skeletons of medieval plague victims along the way.
It was scheduled to open in late 2018, but with just months to go the launch was postponed, and then postponed again as workers struggled to finish 10 new stations and link up three separate signalling systems on the western, central, and eastern stretches of the 100-km. railway.
In 2020, the builders turned to Byford, a veteran public transport executive who ran the Toronto Transit Commission and then the transit authority in New York, where he was nicknamed “Train Daddy” as he grappled with the Big Apple’s often frustrating subway and bus systems.
At last, the largely underground central section from Paddington Station in west London to Abbey Wood in the southeast opens to paying customers this month, days before the UK celebrates the queen’s Platinum Jubilee, though it won’t be fully integrated with the aboveground eastern and western legs until the fall.
The Elizabeth Line will provide a speedy new link between Heathrow Airport west of London, the City financial district in the centre, and the Canary Wharf business hub in the east.
For anyone who has ridden London’s cramped Underground, parts of which are more than 150 years old, the scale of the new line is a pleasant shock. The spacious trains can carry more than 1,000 passengers each. They are also air conditioned, something that’s a rarity on London’s often cramped Tube. The tunnels seem to curve on forever and the stations soar – Paddington is 10 stories high and as long as the Shard, London’s tallest skyscraper.
Crossrail’s builders are proud of the attention to detail, from the purple patterned fabric on the train seats to the playful station design touches, like a ceiling of Liverpool Street Station in the City that is striped to evoke a banker’s pinstriped suit. Lighting is cool in the concourse, warm on the platforms – a “nudge” to subtly encourage people towards the trains.
“It’s airy, fast, the stations are cathedral-like, the air’s fresh. It’s modern, clean,” says Crossrail chief executive Mark Wild. “If there’s ever going to be a railway that’s pandemic-proof, it’s this one.”
The line’s expected ridership is about 200 million a year.
A planned Crossrail 2 that would slice through London from southwest to northeast is on hold, though hopes it will be completed one day.