Currently scheduled for a 2017 opening, gossip has it that that will slip to 2018 or possibly later. Contrary to my immediate assumption, this doesn't appear to be due to sinister Treasury cut-backs but, instead, is a response to the engineering complexity of the project.
At the same time, the £17 billion project has been told to find some economies -- rumours suggest that some of the station designs may have been a tad over the top (and some of the artist's impressions have been a bit eye-popping, even for someone used to the extraordinary works on the Jubilee Line extension -- have another look at the megalomaniacal Docklands station in the first image).
Despite that, Crossrail looks like it's on track to be what was always intended -- a very high-intensity, regional express rail link.
Unfortunately major problems are emerging on its north-south equivalent, Thameslink.
The relationship between the two schemes is clear in that diagram: Thameslink is encountering apparently intractable problems in the London Bridge area, where the costs of re-engineering the line and building a new station have, apparently, reached previously unimagined levels of insanity.
Expect further trimming to Thameslink to be announced soon.
3 comments:
I find it somewhat odd that both schemes avoid Euston/Kings Cross/St Pancras... have I missed something?
Thameslink serves St Pancras (which is right next door to King's Cross). Before the current works started, the old Thameslink nominally served King's Cross but, in fact, that was a separate station a looong walk away. The new and renamed Thameslink station, at the far end of St Pancras, is, ironically, closer to King's Cross than the old.
Euston is badly served by Underground connections, but Thameslink uses mostly existing rail alignments none of which go close. The cost of swerving the line via Euston would have been vast (most of Crossrail's cost is from the tunnelling). Crossrail is primarily meant to relieve the Central Underground line and the City, so swerving it north to serve Euston would not have enabled it to do that.
The third RER-type line planned -- which used to be known as "Chelsea-Hackney" but is now called "Crossrail 2" -- would run from southwest London via Victoria (and an interchange with Crossrail 1 at Tottenham Court Road) to King's Cross and onwards to northeast London. It's intended to relieve pressure on the Victoria line.
Crossrail 2 is at the top of the list of unfunded raiway projects for London, but I suspect there will be a long, long wait before it has any chance of being built.
The relative isolation of Euston from the Underground network was one of the slightly questionable aspects of the high speed rail plan using at as a terminus. I suspect if that did go ahead there would be costly knock-on works to enhance Underground access. Again, it's a long way away.
Thanks for that. I'd have thought that the distance between Kings X/St Pancras and Euston might not be too much for an airport-style "tapis roulant" What do you think, I wonder?
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