Another small but unmistakable victory for London’s newest railway arrived this week: the Elizabeth line’s core Saturday service will rise from 16 to 20 trains an hour, and from December there will be a train every three minutes between Paddington and Whitechapel — a higher off‑peak frequency just in time for the Christmas rush. According to Transport for London, the incremental timetable changes follow earlier capacity increases introduced at peak times and mark a steady programme of service improvements as the route beds in.

The line’s success is all the more striking given how long the idea took to reach reality. Proposals for an east–west cross‑London tunnel have surfaced intermittently since the post‑war era and in the 1990s were already being promoted to commuters on the suburbs’ platforms; the modern project secured statutory approval only with the Crossrail Act of 2008. That slow gestation helps explain why the eventual delivery felt, to many, both overdue and politically freighted.

That sense of overdue delivery hardened into public frustration in the years before opening when the programme slipped repeatedly and costs ballooned. The Crossrail programme’s governance and scheduling problems were the subject of formal scrutiny, and official analysis set out how the estimated price and timetable moved well beyond original plans. The line did, in the end, open, but not without a very public accounting of what went wrong and why.

And yet the operational evidence of benefit has been hard to deny. TfL reported that the Elizabeth line had carried more than 500 million passenger journeys by January 2025, making it the busiest single railway service in the country, and its evaluation work with consultants underlines gains in access to jobs and housing, shorter journey times and high customer satisfaction. Independent national statistics make the scale clear: the central section’s patronage now represents a disproportionate share of rail travel in Great Britain.

Those numbers translate into practical changes across the capital. Journey times between suburbs and key employment districts have been slashed, Heathrow has been stitched more directly into the city’s rail network, and stations from Abbey Wood to Paddington have become focal points for development and new housing. TfL’s own surveys register strong local approval, and the line’s ridership has nudged people out of cars onto public transport in meaningful numbers.

If that payoff seems self‑evident, it prompts an uncomfortable question for national transport strategy: why stop at London? Large parts of the country still suffer the congestion and economic drag that through‑running rail capacity can cure. Proposals that were floated during the Crossrail debate — from extending branches to linking outer suburbs further afield — remain on the table in different guises, yet many have not moved beyond planning discussions.

Outside the capital the problem is especially acute. Birmingham New Street remains constrained by platform capacity that limits how many suburban and intercity services can run, prompting renewed interest in a city‑centre Crossrail to separate local and long‑distance flows. Across the M62 corridor, the four great city regions that together rival London’s population have long argued for a transformational east–west link — variously called Northern Powerhouse Rail, HS3 or Crossrail for the North — yet promised interventions have repeatedly stalled or been pared back. Local leaders in Manchester, for example, have continued to press for additional through platforms at Piccadilly after plans were put on hold amid cost and delivery worries, a move that highlights how difficult even modest capacity upgrades have become.

The political arithmetic helps explain this. Treasury officials and successive spending rounds have tended to treat rail projects as cost centres rather than investments in growth, while road budgets and other capital lines have been handled differently. That mindset, coupled with tight fiscal discipline, has produced an environment in which service cuts and cautious, incremental upgrades are more likely than the big, through‑running projects that remade parts of London.

Evidence from the Elizabeth line suggests that approach is false economy. The route’s early operational headaches and cost escalation are lessons not to be repeated; they do not, however, negate the wider returns. If the transport narrative of recent years teaches anything it is that when you build the right cross‑city connections — and sustain the political will to see them through — passengers, employers and developers follow. Someone in Whitehall should therefore try taking the Treasury on the Elizabeth line’s promise.

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Source: Noah Wire Services