Crossrail Update

I recently got to go to the Tottenham Court Road upgrade exhibition and found a lot of new information while talking to the Crossrail people there.

With Whitechapel under going major rebuilding the middle tracks are going to be lifted and the two island platforms made into one big one with escalators (although seems it might two side platforms with the trains running on the middle on the Crossrail document). This means that London Underground will no longer be able to reverse trains here. Currently the Hammersmith & City line trains from the west terimate here off peak and trains headed east terimate here when there engineering work on either side of the Circle. With this loss Crossrail is going to be creating a new reversing siding between West Ham and Plaistow. This will mean passengers get to use the Jubilee, DLR and c2c services creating better alternate routes.

The second change to the proposal is the change at Heathrow. It was talked about last year with Crossrail taking over Heathrow Express (HEX) services to and from the airport to Paddington. What it now seems is these talks failed and Crossrail will take over the Heathrow Connect services in and out of Terminal 4. This leaves Terminal 5 with HEx (and maybe Airtrack) express service to Paddington where BAA will get the most money.

It also seems Clapton station (yes its some distance from Crossrail) will be used as the testing ground for Crossrail. No word on what that actually mean yet.

The new Crossrail Briefing they gave out dated July 2008 is a basic leaflet explaining Crossrail. What I noticed is the Network SouthEast logo on the clock. They logo just keeps going.

More updates soon.