A prize worth pursuing: has Elizabeth line shown what rail investment can achieve? | Rail industry

Halfway to a billion journeys, and it’s only just begun. Amid the recent gloom, struggles and doubts besetting Britain’s railway there is a bright beacon of hope: the Elizabeth line.

Now accounting for one in seven national rail journeys, the east-west cross-London railway has smashed forecasts and remoulded the travel habits and urban geography of the south-east.

So far, so good for the lucky Londoners upgraded from the tube to a far quicker, cleaner and quieter ride. But beyond, with the north of England still waiting for promised better railways, and a chancellor beating the drum for infrastructure investment, the line serves to demonstrate that the nation can indeed still build things, and that the people will absolutely come.

Last month the Elizabeth line reached a milestone of 500 million passengers since it opened in May 2022. That figure has all but restored rail’s official passenger numbers to pre-Covid levels, fuelling the belief of those in the industry who forecast usage would boom again.

The well-heeled commuters from the stockbroker belt who once poured into London are yet, if ever, to return in pre-pandemic numbers, but the Elizabeth-line stations of Liverpool Street and Paddington have overtaken Waterloo in the list of Britain’s busiest.

From Paddington’s smart office development in west London, to houses, jobs and conferences landing near new stations at points east, such as Woolwich and Thamesmead, regeneration has been the story of the line.

In recent reports published by Transport for London (TfL) and the engineering consultancy Arup analysing the line’s impact – based on data that was yet to capture the full swell of passengers – more than 90% of customers said it had changed their area for the better. Nearly two-thirds said it had also made it easier to access jobs and employment.

TfL’s analysis shows that within a kilometre of an Elizabeth line station in London, the number of new houses is 8-14% higher, and nearly 400,000 jobs have been created since 2015. House prices around the stations have also increased sharply.

Launching the report, London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, concluded: “When you invest in high-quality transport infrastructure it can provide huge benefits for increased jobs, growth and the new housing we need in London and across the country.”

The latest TfL figures show that Elizabeth line growth continues to outstrip its budgeted increase: a 16% rise in traffic in the first quarter of 2024-25. The line’s director, Howard Smith, director of the Elizabeth line, also said it had not just improved links and capacity but “transformed accessibility”, with level boarding and lifts throughout, and “had vital economic impact across the whole country via a UK-wide supply chain”, including more trains being built in Alstom’s factory in Derby.

“We will continue to focus on improving … and look forward to introducing ten additional Elizabeth line trains to support passenger demand, including at Old Oak Common when it opens as the initial terminus for HS2 services,” he said.

Confidence in infrastructure building has been dented, at the very least, by the HS2 high-speed rail project’s experience of ripped-up plans and blown budgets, but the intersection at Old Oak Common ploughs ahead. The Elizabeth line was similarly plagued by delays and indecision, with construction eventually finished three years late and £3.5bn over budget – which perhaps demonstrates how soon the issues are forgotten once construction is done.

“It’s a step change up in technology and I think that’s what makes it so attractive, really unlike any underground railway in any city,” said Christian Wolmar, the author of The Story of Crossrail, as the project was originally known.

“When you get off the cramped tube, at somewhere like Tottenham Court Road, and emerge into these huge platforms and 250-metre long trains, this completely different world … If only we could have three or four lines like that the whole city would be transformed. We don’t quite have the imagination or the money to make it happen.”

The comparatively swish functioning – from the back-end control and operations to the wide platforms, safety doors and spacious carriages – does not make it immune from all of rail’s problems. In the coming weeks it faces four days of drivers’ strikes called by Aslef over pay. Sharing a railway with the national network has made parts of the line to the west, in particular, as susceptible as any to delay. And being unequipped with toilets its trains are potentially far worse places to be stuck, as when the overhead cables came down in December 2023.

But latest performance figures – well over 90% of trains on time with less than 2% cancelled, and customer satisfaction scores comfortably exceeding the rest of the TfL network – show clear improvement along with booming ridership.

About 35% of its passengers come from pure “abstraction”, in Department for Transport parlance: luring customers in from other lines, who might otherwise have commuted in on a Great Western train from Maidenhead, chugged through the West End on the Central line, or taken the far pricier Heathrow Express train to the airport. Another third of the passengers were already on TfL Rail, the outer London precursor subsumed into the Elizabeth line.

But almost 30% are people who would have driven or previously decided that the journey was not worth the effort.

This matters significantly for rail because investment decisions have been torn between two camps: the traditional Treasury benefit-cost ratios, which critics saw as unduly leaning towards building more infrastructure or improving connections that people already used; or the faith that better public transport will inevitably stimulate new houses, jobs and journeys.

Given its location in the most populated corner of Britain, the Elizabeth line, with a guaranteed market, might never sway the first camp. Nonetheless, the appeal of better links throughout the country is visible in the success of 10 years of Borders Rail, the 30-mile Edinburgh-Tweedbank line, and the instant appeal of the new Northumberland Line, which carried 50,000 passengers in its first month.

Henri Murison, the chief executive of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership, said: “The assumptions on benefits are always wildly lower … they underestimate how transformational the projects will be.”

Despite the strength of feeling on relative underinvestment in the north, Murison stressed the importance of focusing on the Elizabeth line’s success: “It gives an informed discussion on what’s genuinely possible: it’s generated huge opportunities in London and that’s exactly what we could generate in Northern cities with the line – you’d get significant wider investment as well.”

Rachel Reeves has loosened the fiscal rules and committed to fuelling infrastructure investment, but expectations for public spending on rail are muted since the cancellation of HS2’s northern leg. Stung by a decade of inaction since what Murison terms the “grandiose commitments” of more than one Conservative leader to a high-speed line across the north, steadily securing the pieces of the jigsaw – the TransPennine upgrade, a Bradford station, Manchester’s airport link – is now seen as the surer path.

However long that infrastructure takes, the Elizabeth line should demonstrate that it is a prize worth pursuing. As Wolmar put it: “It shows very strongly that if you spend a little bit of extra money making the tunnels bigger and design something attractive, that brings people to it. It justifies public investment, and doing it to a decent standard.”