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LONDON – The world’s oldest underground rapid transit system – the beloved, fragrant, iconic, jingling, crowded pipe – is set to undergo its biggest expansion in decades with the discovery of the super-fast and quiet Elizabeth Line, which promises to transform this city for both travelers and visitors.
The Elizabeth line, which will be ready to board its first passengers on May 24, boasts elegant carriages running on rails laid 10 floors below the streets, balanced on a shock-absorbing, noise-canceling rubber pad, through tunnels with controlled climate, with WiFi.
The new line is more than Tube. Its trains will serve a dual function – as a fully automated Tube in central London and as a Tube to Essex cities in the east and Heathrow Airport and the city of Reading in the west.
When fully operational, the 73-mile east-west corridor will bring distant suburbs closer to the city center, placing an additional 1.5 million people within a 45-minute journey.
London Transport Commissioner Andy Byford, a former senior New York transit administrator, called the new railroad a “miracle of the world” and predicted riders would be “struck.”
He added: “We sweated blood to finish this.”
The discovery coincides well with the platinum anniversary of her namesake, Queen Elizabeth II, who celebrates 70 years on the throne. But authorities are frank that Elizabeth’s line is four years overdue and $ 5 billion over its budget, and that seemingly endless underground tunnels and overhead construction have pushed people toward its path to distraction.
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All in all, Lizzie’s line is worth $ 23 billion.
The line, also known as the Crossrail project, was at its peak the largest infrastructure project in Europe. He has survived three London mayors and four prime ministers – and thousands of scathing headlines from British tabloids over repeated delays.
Stirring through the heart of London, one of the oldest cities in the world, tunnels in their 13 years of digging have discovered prehistoric bison, Roman streets, plague victims, Tudor mansions and many Victorian sewer pipes.
There is a memorial at Liverpool Street Station, marking the site where archaeologists have unearthed the remains of 3,300 victims of successive epidemics in the city, buried in the New Churchyard in Bethlem, or Bedlam, between 1569 and 1738.
Archaeologists have been working for six months to remove skeletons that were buried in a new cemetery at the mouth of the River Thames.
Roman roof. Tudor shoes. London rumors find the story of those rejected on the River Thames.
Nearby is a bird sanctuary created by 3 million tonnes of London clay excavated by tunnel excavators and hauled down the river by barge.
Byford, who was hired in 2020 to bring the lame Elizabeth Line project over the finish line, said digging didn’t slow everything down. The problem was that they were dealing with “the most challenging integration of complex railway systems ever.”
The new line requires three switching modes to keep trains on time and prevent them from crashing. There were “16 million units” and everyone had to talk to each other, said Byford, whose grandfather drove a London bus. Byford suggests that for the upcoming global megaprojects, it is not concrete that is difficult to manage, but computer coding.
The old Tube, the classic Tube, is not going anywhere. The original lines and their workhorse remain.
The London Underground system – and especially the map drawn by Harry Beck in 1933 – shaped many people’s perception of the city’s geography. But soon Beck’s “masterpiece of compressed design” will be reissued, based on the Elizabeth line.
As workers wiped out the last pieces of construction dust at the new Paddington station on the Elizabeth Line, Byford led a group of international reporters through the tour system.
The oldest parts of the London Underground are like a Victorian time capsule. A maze of narrow passages connects the stations, lined with blood-red tiles, with crooked corners and moldy brickwork. The cars smell slightly of urine and yesterday’s pork pies.
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However, the cars from the Elizabeth line have the smell of a new car.
There are 10 new, spacious, artistic underground stations, taller than cathedrals, decorated not with stained glass, but with fiberglass-colored reinforced concrete – designed to calm the city’s thrills from building underground passages, the designers say.
Purple accents point to the queen’s colors for horse racing.
Architectural critic Edwin Heathcott, according to the Financial Times, called the new line “great but strict” and “calm but a little beige.”
Elizabeth’s line is for power, not lightning. Outside the city center, trains will reach 90 miles per hour.
But the journey is so quiet, when the trains are moving, you will hear people, not machines.
There are tempered glass banks along the edges of the platform, so it is impossible to fall on the rails. The glass also surrounds the tunnels to keep the wagons neither too hot nor too cold.
When the bill was first debated in parliament in the 1990s, the challenges of climate change were barely mentioned.
An English castle has stood for centuries. Climate change is causing it to collapse.
Similarly, before Covid, lawmakers were not very interested in an airborne infectious disease that could stagnate the global economy.
So it’s good to know that the Elizabeth line will be flushed with fresh, filtered air – and that the railway line will add 10 percent of the system’s capacity, taking more cars off the road.
Boris Johnson, Mayor of London, hailed the Elizabeth Line as a “huge success for the UK economy” and a “transforming new railway”
But politicians are watching Johnson as prime minister accept the project’s opening, as the Conservative government is committed to “equalizing” spending in Britain, giving more to starving provinces and less to fat London.
The oft-criticized Transport for London agency, run by Mayor Sadiq Khan, is struggling to support himself one day. But Labor’s Khan hailed the railroad as the city’s “new pride”, signaling that Britain was returning to business after Brexit and the pandemic.
Mark Wilde, CEO of Crossrail, was just as enthusiastic when he showed the brilliant stations to reporters this week. “It looks like a pipe, it feels like a pipe,” he said. “But I promise you it’s much more than a pipe.”
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