Crossrail 2.0 - a how-to guide
What would it take to build another Elizabeth Line?
Community notes
What’s on: Pop-Up Padel Court in Marble Arch, available for 1hr bookings throughout August (kit included). And the Greenwich+Docklands International Festival of free outdoor and performing arts, from the 23rd of August.
Jobs: City Hall is recruiting a Senior Programme Co-ordinator for its work on the housing crisis. And also for a Senior Manager for its Building Safety Programme.
Volunteering: London Catalyst, a grant-making charity focussed on poverty in London, is recruiting for trustees. As is London Waterkeeper, a local charity working to reduce pollution in the Thames.
Written by Benedict Springbett for the Greater London Project
The Elizabeth Line has only been open for two years, but already it’s hard to imagine life without it. In the year ending March 2024, there were 220 million journeys on the line, which made up 14% of all railway journeys in Britain. It has relieved the Central Line, has made it easier to get to Stratford, Canary Wharf and Heathrow, and has brought Tube-like service to swathes of London suburbia. Its trains are smooth, fast, quiet, spacious and air-conditioned: at once it feels futuristic, and something that ought to be absolutely normal for the largest city in western Europe.
The Elizabeth Line is not a normal Underground line. It’s a Crossrail line: an express underground route across central London, faster than the Tube, which connects with pre-existing commuter lines on opposite sides of town. This means that people in suburbs like Romford and Southall can get a quick, frequent train directly into the centre without needing to change to the Tube at Liverpool Street or Paddington.
The natural successor to the east-west Elizabeth Line, which was known as Crossrail during construction, is the north-south Crossrail 2. First proposed in a recognisable form in the late 1980s, and most recently consulted on in 2015, Crossrail 2 will dwarf the Elizabeth Line: 42 km of new infrastructure, twice as much as the Elizabeth Line, and a dozen new stations. Crossrail 2 trains will run onto railway lines that currently radiate out of Waterloo and Liverpool Street. It will improve connectivity, relieve the Tube, provide a quicker route across town, and make it possible to build 200,000 more houses along the route.
It is also extremely unlikely to happen, for only one reason – cost. In 2017 TfL thought it would come in at £45 billion. That is £58 billion in 2024 money. For comparison, the final bill for the Elizabeth Line was £18.8 billion in 2020, for 21 km of tunnels. Crossrail 2 is expected to cost more per kilometre than even the Elizabeth Line did.
Why is this the case? Partly, it’s because infrastructure costs in Britain are higher than in other countries. In constant international currency values, and including stations, the Elizabeth Line cost $888.50 mn/km. Meanwhile Madrid’s Eje Transversal (a similar project) cost $94.1 mn/km. Crossrail 2 may come in at more than $1,000 mn/km.
One of the most important factors driving these extortionate cost projections is overbuilding. With Crossrail 2, almost all of the new infrastructure will be underground, even though there are parallel above-ground rail corridors which could be upgraded much more cheaply. The plans also involve building unnecessary new underground stations. Underground stations are expensive: Whitechapel station on the Elizabeth Line alone cost £831 million. Spain could build 10 km of railway including stations for the cost of Whitechapel.
But the problems go deeper than digging too many new tunnels. The key to good infrastructure planning is to kill as many birds with as few stones as possible. Crossrail 2, however, is trying to kill too many birds with too many stones. It seems to be trying to solve all of London’s transport problems at once. It wants to relieve the Victoria Line and the southern bit of the Northern Line and the Piccadilly Line. It will provide a tube service to Dalston and Chelsea, and connect Angel with the West End. The effect of all these bells and whistles is to make its construction costs extortionate.
Many of the Crossrail 2 design decisions make sense if we assume money were no object. But money is important. Owing to its cost, Crossrail 2 was unlikely to happen even in 2017, when the public finances were in a better shape and borrowing costs were lower. It is even harder to think it will happen in the near future.
The only way Crossrail 2 will get built is if we make it cheaper. The most obvious way to do this is to rethink its design. A leaner Crossrail 2, which intelligently re-uses existing or abandoned infrastructure, and which is designed with costs in mind, is much more likely to get built.
I propose the following route, which I’ve written about in more detail here and here.
The key features are:
It only has three new underground stations, rather than ten or eleven.
Rather than 35 km of new tunnel, there would be only 13.5 km.
Above-ground stations are used where possible: Wimbledon, Finsbury Park and Clapham Junction.
Between Wimbledon and Clapham Junction, Crossrail 2 would run next to the existing line, rather than digging an expensive tunnel. South of Finsbury Park, it would re-use a disused Victorian tunnel and the abandoned pair of tracks next to the East Coast Mainline.
North of Finsbury Park, the line would go to Welwyn Garden City via New Southgate. This will relieve the Piccadilly Line at minimal cost, and enable quicker journeys for the towns in Hertfordshire along the line.
The line no longer serves Chelsea or Hackney, both of which are famously Tube deserts within Zone 2. I think that there is a good case for building a Tube line between those two places. Likewise, something needs to be done to relieve the Northern Line in South London, which is the reason Crossrail 2 currently has a station at Tooting or Balham.
But Crossrail 2 can’t solve all of London’s transport problems at once. Crossrail 2 should focus on doing a few things very well, and doing them as cost-effectively as possible. Crudely, assuming the same costs per kilometre as the Elizabeth Line, it might cost about £12 bn: a quarter of TfL’s estimate for its plans. And if we were able to build infrastructure as efficiently as other countries, those costs could be a lot lower still. At Nordic costs it would be less than a third of that; at Spanish costs, less than an eighth.
Admittedly, TfL’s current plans serve slightly more people on paper. But those plans are unlikely ever to get off paper. We need a railway line that is cheap enough actually to get built, rather than an expensive one which will never be more than a line on a map.
Reads of the week:
Dave Hill, author of On London, has a great piece on the proposals for developing the Truman Brewery on Brick Lane - which are expected to go to Tower Hamlets Council for permission soon.
Ben Hopkinson, Policy Researcher at Britain Remade, writes about the implications of the Government’s new housing targets for London.
From across the Pond: Daniel Golliher, Founder of Maximum New York, writes about the ‘Silent Majority Paradox’ in local politics.
From the archives: In June, Samo Burja wrote about the history of cities like London, and why they matter for civilisation.
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