From:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/poli...your-feet.html

Quote:
"Last week I went to see the Crossrail excavations at Canary Wharf, four
years after we had officially got them going, and I remembered how fragile
the project had seemed. There was a time when we had to fight for
Crossrail, when senior cabinet ministers were denouncing it as a mad plan
to build a pointless trench across London. It was an easy way to save
£16 billion, they said. Axe it now, they said, and no one will even miss
it.

Well, thank heavens we didn’t listen to that guff. Crossrail’s tunnel is
now a giant and growing fact, that will revolutionise east-west transit in
the greatest city on earth, pinging you from Heathrow to the City in about
half an hour. Its fast air-conditioned network will run from Maidenhead in
the west to Shenfield in the east.

Crossrail will increase London’s rail capacity by about 10 per cent, and
generate an estimated £42 billion worth of growth across the country. Even
in its construction phase, Crossrail is good for the whole of Britain. Of
its 1,600 contracts, 62 per cent have gone to firms outside London – more
than half of them small and medium enterprises (SMEs). There are bridges
from Shropshire, cranes from Derbyshire, grouting from Coventry, piling
from Oldham, lifts from Preston and vast quantities of lubrication from
Bournemouth.

The project is responsible for about 55,000 jobs across the country, and it
would have been utter insanity to cancel it – not just because of the jobs
it creates, but because it is essential if we are to cope with the demands
on our transport network.

London will have a million more people in the next 10 years, and without
Crossrail the Central line would become so packed and overheated that it
would not be fit, under EU rules, for the transport of live animals. It is
a vivid and powerful lesson in the vital importance of investing in
transport infrastructure, and of driving on ruthlessly with essential
schemes: the Tube upgrades, new river crossings, Crossrail Two, and others.
They are not just good for London, but for the whole of Britain.

And yet none of these Crossrail statistics do justice to what is being
achieved. When Patrick McLoughlin, the Secretary of State for Transport,
and I went into the new station box at Canary Wharf, I felt a sense of
primeval awe, like a Neanderthal stumbling into the gloom of Lascaux. It is
akin to a gigantic subterranean cathedral several times the size of
Chartres. The boring machine is like a colossal steel-toothed remora or
lamprey, grinding her way through the clay.

I stood beneath her jaws, and fingered some of that thick black Bournemouth
lube, and they told me how the machine had driven with such accuracy that
when she entered the station box she was only 5mm off target. This is the
biggest engineering project in Europe, an amazing advertisement for British
construction; and when you look at it you wonder why we are sometimes so
prone to self-doubt.

When the next coronation rolls round, we won’t need a new mountain to
climb. We’ll have the joy and excitement of Crossrail Two, as she chomps
her way from Hackney to Chelsea; and unlike climbing Everest, the scheme
will be of practical benefit to all.

In the meantime, we need a proper name for Crossrail, the vast new line on
London’s underground network – and who better to give her name to that line
than someone who has served her country so unfailingly and well for 60
years?"

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