Elizabeth Line: an engineering marvel worthy of the hype
Standing in the centre of Soho Square Gardens, admiring what was once one of London’s most fashionable areas, you will likely be totally oblivious to what is happening underneath your feet.
Twenty-four metres below street level, running under countless listed townhouses, the trains of the new Elizabeth line are hurtling, almost silently, at speeds of around 60 mph – revolutionising rail travel in the capital, and cutting commute times for those living outside London.
The long-awaited train line stretching across London – which was due to open in 2018, but suffered repeated delays – finally opened its doors to commuters on Tuesday. Ahead of the opening, transport enthusiasts travelled from as far as Canada and Hong Kong to experience the new line. Hundreds of passengers waited outside Paddington Station to get the first service at 6:33 am, with some having queued since midnight.
The Elizabeth line is a genuinely impressive feat of engineering – even to the untrained eye. Indeed, on Tuesday morning, at any one of the five central London stations (I visited every single one, apart from Bond Street which has yet to open) there were dozens of train-goers, camera-phones out, intent on documenting the whole experience.
This doesn’t change as you descend on the space-age, LED-lit escalators. In the hour or so I spent train-hopping, I saw hundreds of passengers photographing everything from the platform screen doors to the sleek departure boards.
Tunnelling for the project began in 2012, when the first of Crossrail’s boring machines, Phyllis, began her journey towards Farringdon. This was followed by three years of non-stop digging by seven additional machines – weaving around other tube lines, post office railways, culverted rivers and sewers – that was completed in 2015.
The project then saw its end date pushed back from 2018 to 2022, with the Covid pandemic adding to the delays. Finally, four years late, and £4bn over budget, the Elizabeth line is one of the largest transport engineering projects in Europe, and is meant to employ more technologically complex systems than anything outside China.
The line will operate as three separate services until the autumn, with passengers needing to change at Paddington or Liverpool Street. Within a few months, however, the line will be fully operational, from east to west and back again, giving passengers an uninterrupted trip through central London.
The Elizabeth line’s tunnels are much wider than those of traditional tube stations. This, according to Roger Hawkins, founding partner of Hawkins\Brown, who designed the new Tottenham Court Road Station, is down to modern tunnelling techniques.
The underground stations of the 19th and 20th centuries were “cut and cover”, Hawkins told Reaction, meaning “they were dug down from the street, causing chaos – the whole of the Kingsway and Southampton row was redeveloped when the Piccadilly line was built.”
He added: “Crossrail just appears out of the ground, it’s quite incredible how all of this has been going on for years, under the surface, without people really knowing about it. It’s a real feat of engineering.”
The size of the bored tunnels also allows for bigger trains. In fact, the Elizabeth line’s trains are built for the mainline, and have a capacity of 1,500, nearly twice that of trains on the Piccadilly Line. When fully operational, the Elizabeth Line will be able to carry 200m passengers per year, something that will help alleviate pressure on the rest of the London Underground.
“There isn’t space on the roads for everyone to have a private car,” Hawkins said. “So we have to invest in public transport …the Central Line is late Victorian, it’s overdue, it’s congested, and often stations are at capacity. So, to create that additional space, and encourage people to use public transport, can only be good.
“I think a healthy public transport system in London will benefit the whole country.”
Building a new underground line in central London is by no means an easy job, however. Engineers and architects not only had to avoid other tunnels, but also the foundations of London’s buildings. They also had to find a way to construct the new stations into an existing city. The 200 metre platforms of the Elizabeth line are so long that passengers arriving in Liverpool Street can find themselves exiting from either Liverpool Street or Moorgate, a completely different station, depending on which end of the platform they leave the train.
The designers of the Elizabeth Line also took measures to reduce noise pollution created by the passing trains. Where the line passes underneath the Barbican Concert Hall, and Soho – home to many of London’s recording studios – the railway tracks were floated on top of springs to remove as much vibration as possible.
More than just being a marvel of engineering, the Elizabeth line is a triumphant example of Britain’s architectural talent. The new stations are a stunning departure from the cramped, Covid nightmare of the traditional London Underground that was built in the Victorian and Edwardian periods.
“These stations are like cathedrals … I challenge anyone who uses the Elizabeth line next week not to have their breath taken away – it’s just mind-blowing,” said the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, last week. He’s right. The new stations are undeniably breath-taking, and are capable of replicating some of the awe felt upon entering a cathedral.
This, apparently, was fully intended. Oliver Tyler, director of WilkinsonEyre, who designed the new Liverpool Street and Moorgate stations, said: “I liken the escalator boxes to a medieval cathedral nave… we tried to make the escalator boxes open and expressive, by making sure that there was no propping or structure. The idea being, if you are coming up from the platforms, you would have a view of this grand space.”
Another reason why these stations are so large is to help natural light create an airy environment, Hawkins said, adding that it feels wonderful, “getting daylight down in the ticket halls.”
At Liverpool Street, one of the Elizabeth line entrances has a glass canopy with a steel frame. “We were very keen to make sure we could get as much daylight in as we could,” Tyler told Reaction.
The glass canopy has another use: guidance. “As light comes out of it at night, it acts like a lantern, so it aids wayfinding in the street at night.”
Ease of travel is a concept built into the rest of the stations, with a focus on creating clear and legible routes, in the hope of avoiding the congestion that plagues other underground lines.
“The construction of the tunnels lends itself to those sorts of fluid, flowing lines that I think aids intuitive wayfinding,” says Tyler. “It makes the cross passages more open so that we try and make people feel comfortable – not feeling that there are, sort of, corners where people might be hiding behind …it helps people feel comfortable moving through those spaces.”
The new line is set to put 1.5m people within 45 minutes of central London and will serve the capital for at least 125 years. For the architects who have worked on the project – several of them, like Hawkins and Tyler, for some 30 years – its opening is the crowning moment of decades’ worth of work. “It’s fantastic to see the trains and stations come alive with people using them. You know, just to see the expressions on their faces, just realising where they are,” Hawkins said.
The Elizabeth line may have had teething problems and some delays, but the project is still a magnificent victory for the future of British transport as well as a celebration of the country’s great engineering skills. With 130,000 passengers before 10am on its first morning of service, the new line will be an enormous improvement for those travelling around the capital as well as providing better access to the whole country.