Crossrail on Thursday confirmed that “bugs” in software for trains and signalling systems could delay the opening of London’s new £17.6bn railway by more than two years.
Crossrail Ltd said after a board meeting to review progress on the troubled project that it aimed to open the central section of the railway line from Paddington to Abbey Wood sometime between October 2020 and March 2021.
Crossrail was originally due to open its central section in December last year but announced in August that it had been delayed.
The entire railway line, which will run from Reading and Heathrow in the west to Shenfield and Abbey Wood in the east, is not expected to open before the end of 2021.
The cost is expected to stay within Crossrail’s revised budget of £17.6bn, up from the £15.4bn originally agreed in 2009.
Mark Wild, who was appointed chief executive of Crossrail Ltd last year to turn round the project, told the Financial Times that the “complex job of knitting the train and signalling systems together” meant there was “still some uncertainty around the opening schedule”.
“That uncertainty was never understood by the previous management,” he added.
Sadiq Khan, London’s mayor and chair of Transport for London, the capital’s transport authority, said he was “deeply angry and frustrated” when he learnt about the delay to Crossrail last year.
“We now have a new Crossrail leadership team who have worked hard over recent months to establish a realistic and deliverable schedule for the opening of the project, which TfL and the Department for Transport will now review.”
Caroline Pidgeon, chair of the London assembly’s transport committee, questioned whether the six-month opening window between October 2020 and March 2021 was a “hedge betting exercise to avoid disappointing passengers once more”.
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Problems with building Crossrail’s stations is one key reason for the delays with the project. While construction and fitting out of nine of the 10 stations in the central section of the railway is now expected to be finished this summer, work on Bond Street will continue next year.
The software development for the trains and signalling systems, led by Bombardier and Siemens, respectively, has still to be completed.
“The train software needs to be given a chance to mature,” said Mr Wild. “There are bugs on the Siemens system we are running and we need to get them out. We need to whizz around the track hundreds of times to do that.”
The 70 Bombardier trains ordered by TfL have to be integrated with three different signalling systems.
Mr Wild said delays to the completion of train and signalling software meant Crossrail was only able to test with four trains currently: far short of the 24 that will run at peak times each hour between Paddington and Whitechapel.
He also said that the project “was in a muddle” when he joined last year with “lots of overlapping tasks and the priorities unclear”. But he added that work had been “resequenced, hangs together and is achievable”.
