Crossrail has finally got the go-ahead—and not a moment too soon. But while business is footing a large chunk of the bill, it looks like government is running the show

After 18 years' gestation, Crossrail is going to be a very big baby indeed. And the bigger the baby, the higher the risk of complications. Can this ambitious scheme avoid the messy overspend and delay we have come to associate with huge civil projects in this country—particularly those involving tunnels?

The £15.9bn railway is meant to simplify and speed up journeys across London—and introduce much-needed capacity. It it is hoped that it will boost UK GDP by between £37bn and £68bn over 60 years, according to its backers, and improve international links by joining the city centre to airports at Heathrow, London City, and Stansted (via Liverpool Street), and to the Channel Tunnel rail link (at Stratford).

Crossrail was first proposed in 1989, along with plans for a Chelsea-Hackney underground line and the Jubilee Line extension. Planning for the Chelsea-Hackney Line inches forward with no great urgency—it is supposed to be built by 2025. The Jubilee extension has been completed, and now serves as a model of project management muddle and waste.

Few can argue against the usefulness of an east-west route across London. Isambard Kingdom Brunel wanted one in 1840, when he planned a railway that would have shared the underground system. Nearly 170 years later, it seems no less desirable. Thousands of commuters pour into the city from the rail termini at rush hour; the tube network is infamously congested; and (although Thameslink provides a north-south rail route) cross-London journeys are rarely seamless. Getting from Heathrow to the City, or from Paddington Station to Canary Wharf, is a complicated, time-consuming experience.

Crossrail hopes to improve all that. It will run from Maidenhead in Berkshire, through Slough and Southall, with a spur to Heathrow Airport. Using existing infrastructure where it can, or building its own, it will dip underground between Acton and Paddington, passing beneath the West End and the City before splitting in two—one fork heading in the direction of Canary Wharf and Woolwich, the other back into daylight towards Stratford, then on to Essex: via Romford to the end of the line in Shenfield.

Crossrail's supporters have long insisted this is vital to cope with anticipated growth in London's population and economy, and sustain its role as an international business hub and tourist destination. Some curmudgeonly Londoners didn't want holes dug near their homes, but there has been little orchestrated opposition to the plan itself. Successive governments have all liked the idea but have been reluctant to pay for it. The missing link all these years has been the funding.

Deep pockets
The funding model that has emerged splits the bill between the government, Transport for London (TfL) and business (via supplementary Greater London business rates). But government has been determined that the City, as a key beneficiary of Crossrail, should pay its way. The City was less eager, but a noticeable increase in pressure last autumn prompted the City of London Corporation to plug the funding gap with £200m and a promise to help raise another £150m from business.

So, in early October 2007, prime minister Gordon Brown was able to announce, finally, that Crossrail would go ahead. The timing looked suspiciously allied to speculation over an early election. But it was probably no coincidence either that the High Speed 1 rail link, between the handsomely refurbished St Pancras station and the Channel Tunnel, was just about to be opened. Built on time and to budget, its glow of proud success lent an aura of confidence to the Crossrail announcement.

Crossrail needs all the confidence it can get, because it is big, complex and will take eight years to build. Assuming the Crossrail Bill receives royal assent by the summer, Cross London Rail Links (CLRL), which has done all the preparatory work, will then be named as the "nominated undertaker". Jointly owned by TfL and the Department for Transport (DfT), CLRL will become wholly owned by TfL, though the DfT has the right to take it back in the event of serious cost overruns.

CLRL will start buying land and signing up contractors in 2009. There will be no single main contractor, but Bechtel has been working on the design and costings and, with its reputation for tight project management, it would not be surprising to see the company play a central role. Since Crossrail has been a non-project for so long, CLRL is keen to raise its profile among likely contractors, and has reportedly been in preliminary contract talks with the likes of Balfour Beatty, Carillion, Costain, Morgan Est, Nuttall, Sir Robert McAlpine and Taylor Woodrow. Work on the ground should begin in earnest in 2010 and services will, it is hoped, start in 2017.

If all goes well, by then Crossrail will cover nearly 120km of track, including (sucking of teeth here) 42km of tunnelling. It will have 37 stations, including one at Woolwich, paid for largely by a property developer who then gets to build on top of it. Other new central stations will be at Paddington, Bond Street, Tottenham Court Road, Farringdon, Liverpool Street, Whitechapel and Isle of Dogs.

At its peak, it will employ 14,000 people, mainly in the later, fitting-out stages (shifting earth these days is capital-intensive). The 10-carriage trains are not included in the budget, as they will be leased by the train operator—a concession yet to be granted by TfL. At peak periods, at least 24 an hour will run in each direction through the central section.
To achieve that high frequency, carriages will feature big doors, fewer seats and lots of standing room, so that passengers can get on and off quickly—reducing "dwell time", as it is called.

The wrong bottlenecks?
One school of opposition to Crossrail argues that, yes, London needs a trans-city railway, but this is the wrong one, addressing the wrong bottlenecks. Given the city's pattern of expansion, according to this argument, the line should connect directly to Milton Keynes and Northampton in the north-west and to Stansted in the east.

"You could legitimately design a railway serving the long-distance market, but it wouldn't look like the railway we've got," says Keith Berryman, the CLRL managing director whose 2000 study led to Crossrail's revival. He points to the limited seating in the new carriage designs. "There's a limit to how far you would want to travel on that kind of train."

Greater misgivings arise over the likelihood of such a vast project coming in on schedule and on budget. Being late and expensive is a feature of civil mega-projects around the world, not just in the UK. But while some UK schemes—High Speed 1 and Heathrow's Terminal Five among them—prove that we can complete to a timetable and a budget, the scale of the challenge is immense.

Tunnelling beneath a city is a tough challenge—and Crossrail involves a lot of tunnelling under a city that already has plenty of obstacles down below. Boston's Big Dig did something similar, rerouting two miles of motorway under the Massachusetts metropolis. It was finished five years late and cost more than five times what had been predicted.

But overspends are not inevitable. "It's changes to projects that incur cost," Berryman points out. "We have fixed our project and made it clear exactly what we want. We have got the site investigations and the design teams' investigations done before we start. And we aspire to learn from the mistakes of others."

Part of the Jubilee Line extension's troubles stemmed from trying to do things that had never been done before, says Berryman. A state-of-the-art signalling system, for example, developed teething problems that delayed the whole project. "We will only specify things that have worked somewhere else," he promises.

CLRL has clearly done what it can to identify and trim cost and has used qualified risk analysis to assess its options. "We have a lot of information on how much things actually did cost," Berryman says. "We can look at the West Coast Line and see the actual cost as opposed to the estimate. We have also done extensive value management studies, looking at elements of the project that are expensive but don't add to its functionality. Building space underground is very expensive, so the more you can reduce it, the cheaper it gets."

The £15.9bn price-tag does include a 35 per cent contingency figure, but that could be eaten up rapidly if unforeseen horrors should occur. LCR, the consortium that built High Speed 1, showed the effectiveness of obliging contractors to share the risk. While the risk itself was relatively small—contractors were exposed to between £100m and £200m on a £5.8bn contract—it acted as a strong incentive.

Conflicting pressures on the St Pancras site were illustrated in BBC 2's riveting 800 Million Pound Railway Station last November. The programme showed a tearful architect protesting that panelling along one side of the station was two inches shorter than on the other side. He admitted that only his peers would notice, but this seemed to make him even more upset. The contractors' unspoken but pointed refusal to go back and line it up spoke volumes about the power of built-in incentives.

Business has now discovered that, while it may be stumping up a third of Crossrail's cost, it will not be treated as an equal partner in the venture, or even allowed much of a say in its risk management. Transport minister Ruth Kelly has announced that only TfL and DfT will co-sponsor the project, though businesspeople will be invited onto the CLRL board as non-
executive directors.

London First, the employers' lobby group that spearheaded the pro-Crossrail campaign, has expressed disappointment in this set-up. It fears the venture could become a political football, kicked between the government and the Mayor of London. That may now be the greatest threat to Crossrail. If Boston's late, extortionate Big Dig taught civil engineers anything, it was not to let the politicians get involved.