Want to know what's going right in Britain? Come to the capital, look at the Elizabeth line railway

The Guardian

2 days ago

Another week, another piece of good news concerning London's newest railway. This time it's a timetable update showing that the Saturday service on the core section of the Elizabeth line will increase from 16 to 20 trains an hour. From December, there will be a train every three minutes between Paddington and Whitechapel, higher than the normal off-peak frequency, just in time for your Christmas shopping. OK, it's hardly world peace or a custodial sentence for the people who keep adding AI to search engines, but in 2025 you take what you can get.
There are two competing narratives about what, in happier times, we used to know as Crossrail. The first and most familiar is a litany of complaints. The new line took for ever to happen, even by the standards of such things: an east-west heavy rail tunnel linking Paddington and Liverpool Street was first proposed mere weeks after the conclusion of the Blitz, and as far back as the 1990s information leaflets about the plan were appearing at outer London stations and exciting some of the cooler local teenagers. But the route didn't actually get the nod until 2008, at almost exactly the point someone in the offices of Lehman Brothers was asking: 'So, when you say sub-prime …'
And then, of course, it arrived late and over budget. This is par for the course with infrastructure 'megaprojects', which have a well-known habit of costing billions more than projected – but the insulting thing about this one was that, as late as the summer of 2018, its promoters were still touting it as the exception to the rule. On the last day of August that year, though, about four months before opening day, news broke that it would not be delivered on time. In retrospect, the fact the stations were visibly unfinished should have been a useful clue. In the end, the £4bn budget overrun – on a single London project – was bigger in itself than the sum Rachel Reeves put aside for transport in any single city region in 2025.
Less expensive but more irritating was the line's new name. London has a habit of doing this – the only tube lines built since the network effectively entered public ownership in 1933, the Victoria and the Jubilee, were named for the royals, too. Nonetheless, it felt deeply weird to do this while Queen Elizabeth II was still alive.
And so, by the time the line opened in 2022, the shine had come off. But that's when the narrative began to change – because, while there have been teething problems (mostly involving signalling, mainly in west London), it's become increasingly obvious that the line has been an enormous success. By its third anniversary in May, it had provided more than half a billion journeys, more than any other operator in that period, including the entirety of the South Western Railway or Northern Trains networks – this, remember, for what is in essence a big tube line. It is also responsible for a staggering one in seven journeys on the entire British rail network. TfL reckons almost 30% of these are people who'd previously have travelled by car or not at all.
More than that, the line has transformed the geography of London. It has halved journey times from parts of south-east London to the West End, put Paddington and points west in easy reach of the eastern suburbs and provided passengers at Heathrow with a single fast train to essentially everywhere. Even the ExCel exhibition centre in the Royal Docks is no longer hell to reach (merely to enter). Suburbs have been regenerated, more jobs created, more houses built; the line's forelock-tugging name has ceased to sound weird. It's hard to argue it was not worth the wait.
All of which raises an obvious question: if it worked this well, why on earth are we not building more of it? As things stand, at least six trains an hour – a service frequency passengers in much of London, let alone elsewhere, would kill for – go no farther west than Paddington. Doesn't that suggest a case for an extension? Or what about the abandoned plan to extend the Canary Wharf branch to Ebbsfleet in Kent? Or for Crossrail 2, the latest iteration of the nearly-as-long-discussed Chelsea-Hackney route? Or for extending the Bakerloo line to Lewisham?
The biggest prizes, though, are surely not even in London. One of the big constraints on the West Midlands rail networks is the shortage of space at Birmingham New Street station. A Birmingham Crossrail, allowing suburban trains to travel from east or west, could enable higher frequencies by getting local trains out of the way of intercity ones, and revolutionise transport in a city still far too dependent on cars.
Then there's the M62 corridor, where four city regions with a combined population nearing London's abut. The region's terrible transport links are not the only reason productivity in Manchester or Leeds lags their continental peers – but the fact commuters can't rely on trains turning up on time or at all when deciding where to work surely can't be helping. And yet governments have repeatedly refused to back the new line – branded variously as Northern Powerhouse Rail, High Speed 3 or Crossrail for the North – meant to address this. Even less ambitious schemes – new through platforms at Manchester Piccadilly, electrification to bring the region at last into the late 20th century – have been loudly promised then quietly abandoned. Reeves has promised £3.5bn to fund upgrades on the existing TransPennine route – but given that a new Manchester-Leeds route was projected to cost £5bn when proposed over a decade ago, it is hard to see how this the extra cash could provide anything even close to the transformative new line that London is now enjoying.
The reason, of course, is that the Treasury sees rail infrastructure not as investment but as a new cost centre. (Road maintenance, for some reason, never gets the same treatment.) In direct contrast to the bit of the rail network run by TfL, indeed, stealth nationalisation on the rest of the network has been accompanied by service cuts.
This is absurd. Experience suggests that, if you build it, they will come, and jobs and homes will follow. Someone should take the Treasury on the Elizabeth line.
Jonn Elledge is an author and former assistant editor of the New Statesman