FOR CROSS RAIL

RMTnews :: february 2006 :: www.rmt.org.uk 20 Ten Members of Parliament are currently deliberating the future of Crossrail in a special Select Committee of the House of Commons. They will spend the next few months – maybe a year – scrutinising the detail of the Crossrail Bill and improving it where possible. But what is Crossrail and why does Britain need it? Crossrail, a joint venture company between Transport for London (TfL) and the Department for Transport (DfT), is a new train line planned to link Paddington in London to Liverpool Street with a tunnel. It will also have a south-eastern branch from Whitechapel to the Isle of Dogs and onward to Abbey Wood east of Woolwich. Existing train lines from Maidenhead in Berkshire to Paddington and Shenfield in Essex to Liverpool Street will be upgraded and become part of Crossrail. The new line is projected to carry about 200 million passengers each year. ALL CHANGE Campaign for Crossrail director Alex Hilton explains that more than carrying millions of passengers, Crossrail changes the way its passengers use public transport in London. “Today, commuters along the Slough or Shenfield corridors usually have to change onto the underground at Liverpool Street or Paddington and often change again nearer their destination. “Crossrail cuts through the heart of the West End and the City with stations at Bond Street, Tottenham Court Road and Farringdon, providing far more options for commuters and reducing the passenger bottleneck at the two rail termini,” he says. If you add to this the benefit of having two spare platforms at each of the current termini, the platforms could be used to increase the regularity of services on other corridors. However, the benefit of connecting the City, West End, Canary Wharf and the commuter belt won't just be felt in London. The Department for Transport has estimated that Crossrail will add £24 billion to the UK economy. The scheme itself will cost in the region of £10 to £15 billion. This makes Crossrail an enormous rail project, dwarfing even the Channel Tunnel Rail Link. But like CTRL, it will stimulate investment and regeneration along the route. Canary Wharf alone plans to build enough office space for 90,000 new jobs on the Isle of Dogs and sites all along the route have been identified for development. This new line, which will serve Stratford in east London, isn't scheduled to be ready in time for the 2021 Olympic games, the planned opening instead being planned for 2015/6. But even so, Crossrail will secure the legacy of the Olympics, ensuring it doesn't become and expensive white elephant after the games – just as it will ensure the success of the Thames Gateway regeneration plan. Alex points out that Crossrail is not just good newss for London. The steel, ballast, cement, signalling – everything to make a train line work, including the trains themselves – would all be made outside London in the rest of the country. And the scheme ensures that London would continue to compete with other world cities, because jobs that are lost in London are more likely to go to Frankfurt, New York or Shanghai than to elsewhere in Britain. “Securing London's future is necessary for the whole country as this one city is the dynamo at the heart of the UK economy and any failure to keep London moving will be felt by people all over Britain,” says Alex. For more information on Cross Rail and the campaign visit websites www.campaignforcrossrail.com or www.crossrail.co.uk/ FOR CROSS RAIL RMT has joined the Campaign for Crossrail coalition to put pressure on MPs, Peers and Ministers to make sure the new rail artery for London actually happens