Elizabeth Line: Ross Lydall explains where it all went wrong
Elizabeth Line: Ross Lydall explains where it all went wrong
Transcript
00:00 Tuesday May the 24th 2022, a date that has gone down in London transport history. The
00:09 Elizabeth line finally opened. Now it may have been three and a half years late and
00:16 about four billion pounds over budget, but this was one of the most significant events
00:21 in the London transport system for decades. Up there and probably even surpassing the
00:27 opening of the Victoria line back in 1968 or the Jubilee line in 1979 and the Jubilee
00:34 line extension to Canary Wharf in Stratford in 1999. I can recall being there on that
00:41 first morning when vast crowds gathered at Paddington station to be the first to ride
00:46 on the new trains. It was such a joyous mood, it was almost as if the years of delays had
00:52 simply been forgotten to stroke. A week earlier the Queen had turned up at Paddington station
00:58 to give the 20 billion pound line the Royal Seal of Approval. It turned out to be one
01:03 of her last public engagements and unfortunately due to failing health she was unable to ride
01:09 on the trains, but she did describe the new railway as spectacular. The line was renamed
01:15 the Elizabeth line in honour of the Queen as far back as 2016. During construction it
01:21 was known simply as Crossrail. A date was even booked in the Queen's diary. She had
01:26 been due to open the line on December the 9th 2018. However that date had to be scrapped
01:33 due to massive problems both with the construction of the tunnels and the stations, but in particular
01:38 problems with the trains, their signalling software and their on-board computers simply
01:43 wouldn't talk to each other. So Transport for London had to make the awkward call to
01:48 Buckingham Palace to say "I'm sorry, the Queen is not required on this date, we'll
01:52 come back to you with a new date". It took them about four years before they could do
01:56 that. The central section of the Elizabeth line was the first to be opened. This ran
02:01 between Abbey Wood in south-east London and Paddington station. A few months later in
02:06 October 2022, On Street station opened, one of the main two stations on Oxford Street
02:13 alongside Tottenham Court Road. Transport for London was then able to join up the three
02:18 different sections of the Elizabeth line, both the section between Shenfield and Essex
02:24 which came into Liverpool Street and also the section from Paddington out to Heathrow
02:29 Airport and to Reading. So within the first year or so, eventually trains were able to
02:35 run all the way from Shenfield to Heathrow Airport and all the way from Abbey Wood to
02:40 Reading and back again. It soon became apparent how popular the Elizabeth line was. It earned
02:47 itself a nickname, the Lizzie line. Passengers transferred from the London Underground, people
02:52 flocked to it, preferring its large air-conditioned carriages to the small, packed and often sweaty
02:59 central line. Quickly the Elizabeth line became the busiest line in the entire country, carrying
03:05 more passengers than commuter railways such as Southeastern, Southern and South Western
03:11 Railway. Today it is responsible for an extraordinary one in six of all rail journeys in the UK
03:17 on a daily basis and it's getting busier. On a typical weekday now, it can carry almost
03:23 800,000 passengers. However, it is becoming something of a victim of its own success,
03:30 particularly on its western section between Paddington and Heathrow Airport. There have
03:35 also been repeated problems with the network rail track and signalling west of Paddington.
03:41 Essentially this is the Lizzie line's Achilles heel, that this £1 billion fleet of brand
03:46 new trains are having to run on substandard infrastructure. When you're running up to
03:52 24 trains an hour at peak times, it doesn't take much for things to go badly wrong very
03:58 quickly. That said, the nightmare chaos suffered by thousands of Elizabeth line passengers
04:05 and also passengers on the Heathrow Express and on a Great Western Railway intercity train
04:10 out of Paddington going to Wales last week is not normal. The Office of Rail and Road,
04:16 the sort of rail regulator, told me today it is considering whether to launch an investigation
04:21 and that will include the amount of time that passengers were left stranded on these trains
04:26 up to four hours in some situations. The only good news is that the man at the top, Andrew
04:33 Haynes, the Chief Executive of Network Rail, knows exactly what happened. He has apologised
04:39 to passengers, he said that the industry as a whole has let passengers down and he should
04:45 know because he was one of those people himself stuck on that Great Western train.
04:49 [Music]
04:52 [BLANK_AUDIO]