Putting Crossrail back on track

ALL you should need to glide down the escalators into Bond Street’s stunning new Crossrail station is a contactless credit card. Sleek Elizabeth line trains should be running through it. But only weeks before the planned opening date last December, Transport for London admitted that it wasn’t ready.

It was a huge blow. So what went wrong with the £16bn Crossrail project and how long will it take to fix? To find out I followed TfL boss Mike Brown and Mark Wild — the man who used to run the Tube and has just been landed with the job of getting Crossrail open — deep into the new station.

First, we pulled on the bright orange safety gear you need to visit a construction site. Forget being ready to run: it says everything that you can’t visit without hard hats and safety boots.

I’ve been following the project since the start — I’ve crawled to the front of drilling machines cutting through London clay and seen stations, including Bond Street, over the years. This time, I expected to find a shiny new structure ready to open. I was taken aback by how much remains to be done. Only now is everyone facing up to reality.

What you see — as you scramble down a temporary staircase, past temporary cabling (the main power supply to the station still hasn’t been installed and work is still being powered by diesel generators), across temporary floors (they are still laying the tiles) and under temporary ceilings (the lighting systems in lots of places are only just being fitted) — is evidence of a project which, as Brown puts it, “just ran out of runway” last year.

Looking at it all — the piles of panelling not fixed in place, the escalators still in bits, the drilling, the hammering, the workers everywhere, the complex fire system still not there — you can see that there was never a cat in hell’s chance of this site being ready for passengers on December 9 last year.

What’s there is brilliant: Crossrail’s amazing engineers have built a vast system that will astonish Londoners when they get to use it. We should re-member that the delay will be forgotten soon enough, while the benefits will be enjoyed for decades. But the job of turning empty new concrete tunnels into a living transport system has proved a struggle.

“The team got completely over-whelmed and a bit of my job is to bring simplicity,” says Wild, quietly spoken and convincing, as we stand on one of the platforms where wall panels are still being installed. “The challenge at a senior level at Crossrail was an in-creasing sense that, ‘We have always got through these huge challenges so you know what we’re going to get through this.’ The question mark is, should we have identified it earlier?”

He wishes the builders — working in a separate organisation that answered jointly to the Government and TfL — had come to him sooner with a message of “I know we said we were pretty much on the cusp of finishing but actually we need a bit more time”.

Part of the problem, says another rail industry leader, is that “projects like these are always run by optimists”. It’s more than a year since a key power supply blew up when it was first tested. It should have been obvious that building work was late. But no one dared join up the dots.

At least that’s one story. Another comes from Sir Terry Morgan, Crossrail’s respected former chairman, who resigned last year after the delays became known. He argues that the big hold-up was not the stations but the trains — which were overseen by TfL. They “were at the heart of the problem”, he says. You can ride one of them now on the old lines from Paddington and Liverpool Street but the job of getting them to work with new digital signals in the tunnels has been tough.

Morgan believes if the trains and their signal systems hadn’t been late, he might have got parts of the line open sooner, or even on time. TfL doesn’t agree. “The previous team tried to persuade themselves they were ready for dynamic testing earlier but there will still be much to do, too much work to do in the tunnels,” says Brown.