Crossrail update on the Elizabeth line’s opening plans
ianvisits.co.uk
ianvisits.co.uk
Although it’ll be several months I thought before trains from Stratford will delve into the tunnels.
I’m sure you can appreciate the impracticality of building a train to signalling system interface that uses cables!
ETCS can use cable loops, but for full functionality a radio data connection is required.
In the case of Crossrail the core (new tunnels) use CBTC signalling, I think based on Siemens TrainGuard - I think the specification of the project predates ETCS being proven as a viable solution for this particular kind of service. The services leaving Stratford to the East use TPWS/AWS in common with most services on the UK mainline network.
The challenge is in the transition between the two systems, as I understand it - anything out of the ordinary and the train will of course come to an immediate halt.
So can't they use the power cables for comms?
I’m getting out of my depth, but I’m sure I’ve seen at least one signalling system that uses the track circuit as a data signalling channel to the train to provide in-cab signalling, so I’d guess it’s at least theoretically possible.
I’d imagine it would have much the same challenges as radio in practice though - interference from poor connections and ambient noise, not to mention your channel is basically a massive antenna.
Reminds me of Feyerabend's "Against Method".
What's a bit strange is that they've been running the same trains with passengers on from Liverpool Street through Stratford for more than 2 years, with passengers, as TFL rail. But I guess they had to upgrade the signalling around Stratford to work with the trains coming through the core, and that is still buggy
https://anonw.com/2021/08/12/the-crossrail-tunnel-portal-at-...
From there the train will travel underground to the Liverpool St - Moorgate station.
There’ll still be Elizabeth line trains travelling into Liverpool St station but there’ll be terminating.
Fun fact there’s the large ABBA venue going up at Pudding Mill Lane.
https://www.ourbow.com/abbas-virtual-comeback-show/
The things one misses when not commuting.
No one has called it the ABBAtoir yet, but I’m waiting to see who’ll be the first to come up with that name.
I think you mean Pudding Mill Lane?
Pudding Lane was where the Great Fire of London started.
it was originally buried so that it could connect up with the Metropolitan Railway (today's metropolitian line on the London Underground)
this was so that in 1875 the Met could use the mainline railway station as terminus (whilst their own was under construction)
Trains from Stratford will still be terminating at the same high-level platforms at Liverpool Street. Through running into the core tunnels (and thus a signalling system change) will come later.
This means that the boundary between the mainline signalling and the new CBTC signalling in the core is at Stratford. But this only applies to trains taking the new route; services on the existing GEML/Shenfield Electric lines continue to use mainline AWS/TPWS signalling, which is why there hasn’t been any impact on services to date.
https://www.crossrail.co.uk/news/crossrail-documentary-the-f...
It’s hilarious this is so many years behind schedule. It’s also why I don’t think nuclear is the answer - as a country the U.K. can’t do big projects.
it’s 4 years behind schedule, 2 of those were covid. not bad, not good.
> It’s also why I don’t think nuclear is the answer - as a country the U.K. can’t do big projects.
crossrail was the biggest european construction project. huge undertaking, and with only 4 years behind schedule. for a western project this is pretty good actually.
hinkley point c is just 6 month behind schedule.
but usually if you’re building something huge in a western country then expect huge delays.
The Gotthard Basis Tunnel [0] (delivered 6 months ahead of schedule after 12 years of construction) would like to have a word :)
Apparently the delays are mainly due to station fit outs (Bond Street station will still not be ready for the initial opening), and issues with the signalling systems - including software delays.
Supposedly the detailed design work was behind schedule so they started the physical building work "at risk". Because it was not well planned, it was done in the wrong order - installing cabling before moving a wall so the new cables have to be ripped out along with the old wall for instance. It was alleged that this was done deliberately by the subcontractors to create additional paid work.
A few years ago, recognizing that the project management was a huge mess, there were a lot of big changes and the project management team have been running a events in london showing off the real time project tracking they've put in place.
Presumably, Covid hasn't heled either.
I remember these radio problems from when I was interviewing for rail automation jobs 20 years ago. They were having this exact problem on the jubilee line. The tunnels seem to be an amazingly harsh environment, and the safety requirements seem much harsher than for self driving cars or human train drivers.
I don't entirely doubt this. I actually briefly lived in a flat overlooking the Hayes & Harlington station works some years ago. And also used to often commute to the Prince Regent DLR station which had a good view of the Crossrail works at Custom House. In both cases, as far as I could tell, progress was very slow with typically large amounts of idle workers and equipment sitting around (workers on-site but seemingly without much to do!).
> "They were having this exact problem on the jubilee line."
And Crossrail's signalling is, of course, much more complicated compared to the self-contained Jubilee line because of the need for interoperation with the wider rail network and for trains to run on 3(!) totally different signalling systems: Siemens' proprietary TrainGuard ATO on the central (Paddington-Abbey Wood) section, traditional British TPWS & AWS on the Reading and Stratford branches, and ETCS on the Heathrow branch.
I can certainly imagine that getting all of these systems to work together has been a systems integration nightmare, so it's worrying that they seem to be struggling just to get the core Paddington-Abbey Wood section running in self-contained operation!
crossrail is by far the biggest european construction project.
it’s the most complicated, required the most people, cost the most.
just by length it’s double the size of the gotthard tunnel.
Maybe they’re great at building, poor at scheduling. If they’d +4 year’ed the initial timeline, they’d be “on time”?
We see this in the world of IT. A team will be set an X month timeline by a sponsor who is well in the knowledge that it will take Y months, but who strongly hold some belief (which I do not share) that giving less time, which will have to be extended through painful negotiation, will result in a shorter timeframe than if they’d given Y months expectation.
For major projects like Crossrail you also run into the politics of it. Politicians are short term incentivised. They have budget cycles. etc.
The issue the UK has as far as I'm concerned is that we have a political and managerial class who are basically disinterested in the grand scale.
We don't spend much money, we try to shelve what little we do spend (e.g. we have two aircraft carriers rather than the one that was rumoured for a while, has the world blow up?), Our government is one of the happiest to sell off state assets ever, and now our current government ran out of ideological steam about 7 years ago so we are stuck with a collection of lunatics and retards in power.
I used to be pretty firmly in the "don't tell people they're voting against their own interests" camp, but I was wrong. Our electorate is given a sword to fall on (FPTP), but chooses to jump on the sword rather than make a fuss.
Also in my experience the human aspect of projects is always the most difficult part. The most amazing thing about a company like SpaceX is not the technical achievement. But getting thousands of people to work together on a single goal. And arguably this kind of thing is less problematic in large projects than in the rest of society. But the effects of bad communication is far more visible and explicit. Engineering cuts through and delivers because it actually simplifies things.
On what basis? They've scaled down HS2 and the Northern Rail Plan. Smart motorways is purely a way to avoid expensive, complicated, often necessary road widening with an unsafe technological solution. A lot of the safety issues of smart motorways has also been due to cutting costs - less frequent emergency refuge areas, less cameras than are needed to detect accidents. Now the press has caught up to them they have stopped rolling them out entirely.
I agree that smart motorways are less safe, and there are better ways to reduce demand (like road pricing). Having said that motorways are still very safe compared to other roads, even after being made "smart". I think a modest reduction in safety is an acceptable price to pay if billions can be saved. Invest that money in reducing death from emissions, pedestrian safety, or even our far less safe A road network.
If it goes beyond June then it will be extremely embarrassing for all involved. They’ve repeatedly promised “first half of 2022”, and reaffirmed that very recently.
They still have some know-how based on legacy nuclear power plants and military reactors (which I'm guessing is what Rolls-Royce will build on) but at the moment they cannot build a civil nuclear power plant from scratch by themselves.
This is actually tricky beyond the design and certification. You need the whole industrial capacity as well. For instance, the French government has repeatedly made sure that a specific steel mill in the country remains operational because it is the only one large enough and with the required equipment to manufacture the huge steel domes encasing the nuclear reactor cores...
And we can do manor projects because we are doing major projects. There is Thames Tideway, London Power Tunnels, several offshore wind farms and interconnectors, Great Western electrification, 2012 Olympics.
Can you make a few comparisons to similar infrastructure projects in other countries to illustrate this point? Make sure those countries have similar safety protections for workers, and labour rights, of course.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
Which countries are better at it? The UK has very little (if any) greenfield development opportunities left. You really have to keep things in context. This is a tunnel under London, not some viaduct across bare meadows. One thing you learn in engineering before long is the enormous cost of existing development/infrastructure. You can't always wipe the slate clean and start again even if we'd all like to sometimes.
Crossrail appears to have had bonuses to the original management for constructing the tunnels, I’m not too sure on the details but what is far more galling that the illusion of a Dec 2018 carried on to a few months before.
Warning I’ve just read snippets following this, so following could well be wrong:
Seemingly enough time had been scheduled to run the trains to shake out systems, as well as finish building.
Bond Street build was delayed due to the site being tight, the original contractors were replaced by TfL itself.
Enough time to run tests on the fittings so that the could be proven to be in compliance hadn’t be catered for. If this was an issue I would have thought that could have been started much earlier.
Signalling issues, as mentioned. The trains have to integrate with three different signalling systems.
I believe Project Management itself grew from the UK government having early issues with delivery. Systems aren’t getting any simpler.
A society that can plan, fund, build, and maintain large to huge infrastructure projects would have a huge advantage.
Under the original CEO it was going to be delivered in 2018 right up until mid 2018 when they were like "oh sorry, maybe early 2019?". This was a CEO with basically no construction experience who rarely set foot on site.
They replaced the CEO a few years ago with someone who has a long career in construction, who understood what it takes to build a railway, who really knows the details, and who is on site, in the weeds, understanding the progress at a very granular level. Since he's taken over the communication has been much better, much more consistent, and felt much more honest. He wouldn't commit to a date, but has progressively shortened the window again and again as they've got closer to completion, and maybe this is naive, but I fully believe that they'll hit the goal of "first half of 2022".
Obviously major projects often run into issues. Being that we're a democratic, densely populated country with a lot of history buried under our feet, we perhaps face more political issues than most. Nevertheless, I think saying we can't do big projects is a bit of an exaggeration.
1) Health and safety legislation has evolved to an extent where construction companies can simply not take risks. Of course, this is a great thing if you're a construction worker who enjoys going home to his/her family each night but it does mean that big projects become bogged-down in planning and ensuring that nothing can possibly go wrong from a safety aspect.
2) Sub-contracting of specialist roles where you (as a main contractor) are reliant on multiple partners all being on top of their game and focused on the end goal when, in reality, everyone is out for themselves and happy to sabotage progress for the sake of an easy profit, ego boost or backstabbing opportunity.
From the outside these kind of projects always look easy but from the inside it's a wonder that anything actually gets done.
Oftentimes these sorts of problems aren't due to malice but occur because of unintended consequences of poorly-defined service-level agreements and KPIs for separate contractors whose services have to integrate for overall success.
I was embedded once at a UK Army base that ran in effect a military college for different trades. The on-site restaurant was part of a UK-wide contract that had nationally agreed contracted opening times. These inflexible eating hours were actually the main constraint on when physical education could occur. A single supplier company had two separate contracts to supply instructors and equipment maintenance staff. The maintainers had KPIs that were (again) part of a national level contract that worked against the instructors when important things needed to be quickly repaired.
After the Paddington to Abbey Wood service settles down most of the Heathrow and Reading services will start to run through the tunnels as well, and that becomes the full service.