The Fifteen Billion Pound Railway: Inside the Elizabeth Line
Some people found the opening of the Elizabeth Line terribly exciting. Hundreds queued for hours to be the first passengers aboard this Crossrail service. One of them was a “transport YouTuber” who flew in from Toronto. A man turned up in a waistcoat made from Elizabeth Line purple seat fabric; counting the cost of the sewing machine he’d bought especially, he’d spent £2,000.
If you live elsewhere in the country, you probably couldn’t give a hoot. But BBC Two has been following the project for 10 years and produced The Fifteen Billion Pound Railway, which has now reached its final series.
Crossrail is an impressive feat of engineering, involving the construction of a new tunnel beneath the Thames and nine new stations – described here as “an enormous architectural challenge”. But that fascinating work was explored in previous seasons. We’ve now reached the stage of snagging issues and software problems.
The latter are admittedly quite significant. Alarm bells ring when we learn that the new service depends upon “the most complex train computer software in the world”, controlling trains, tracks and platform doors. “The new Elizabeth Line trains must be able to run seamlessly between three signalling systems,” explained the programme. “The safety of passengers relies on a glitch-free nanosecond transition between them all. This has never been attempted on any other railway anywhere in the world.” Uh-oh.
Gallery: Alphavan (motor1.com)
The Crossrail chief executive, Mark Wild – softly-spoken to the point of being soporific – said at one point that “it’s fair to say we’ve probably gone too far with digitisation. We’ve probably put computer controls into things that maybe weren’t that necessary.” An interesting view, but Wild was not invited to expand upon it.
The software failed during a test run. Elsewhere there were faulty doors, something leaking, a problem with the auto-reverse. A mammoth amount of work went into this project but the programme reduced it to just another dull fly-on-the-wall look at things going a bit wrong behind the scenes. They did add portentous music, in the hope of lending some Apollo 13-level drama to the control room, but the peak was someone saying: “We’ve got four trains queuing up to go into Stratford.” And you hear that every day of the week on London Underground.
