London’s flagship Crossrail plan was touted as a modern marvel of civil engineering, providing a 10% boost to the British capital’s rail capacity, with state-of-the-art electric Class 325 trains, at a cost of £14.8bn (c. $25bn). But more than a decade later, this rail infrastructure project is almost £2bn over budget, and three years late. What went wrong is a salutary tale that illuminates a host of pitfalls for project managers.
The history of Crossrail
The idea of large-diameter tunnels connecting Liverpool Street and Paddington Station was raised by railway public relations officer George Dow as early as the Second World War. This proposal was dubbed “Crossrail” in a 1974 report into its financial feasibility. When the final route was approved in 2007, Crossrail Ltd was formed to execute the project as a subsidiary of the public transportation authority Transport for London (TfL). Already, it can be seen that Crossrail’s problems are rooted in successive generations of planners wrestling with multi-layered urban geography, legal issues and competing interest groups.
However, this does not mean that Crossrail was an impossible project. The Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee (PAC) enumerated in February 2019 a number of specific failings that made overspend and delay inevitable. Chief among the failures identified by the PAC was the devolving of responsibility for oversight. Crossrail Ltd decided to split the engineering work into 36 separate contracts, rather than a smaller number of larger contracts. This created high degrees of interdependence requiring careful synchronisation which TfL failed to manage, compounded by their program contractors, Bechtel and Transcend Ltd, failing to fulfil this role as well.
The PAC were also highly critical of Crossrail Ltd’s over-optimism, as they refused to acknowledge that the project would miss its December 2018 completion goal as late as June of that year. Realism, and decisive action to remediate well ahead of time, would have been an immeasurably better approach.
Overall, what emerges is a picture of diffused responsibility through proliferating contractors and subcontractors without oversight, much less public accountability, in a context of enormously complex urban geography. There will doubtless be textbooks written in future dissecting the debacle in its entirety.
