London?s railway of the future is finally here | Engadget

It’s for this reason that Crossrail was given the green light, as both a way to relieve congestion on its tiny, Victorian-era tunnels, and to recognize just how broad London’s influence had become.Crossrail runs from Shenfield, a commuter suburb 35 miles northeast of London in the neighboring county of Essex, via the Great Eastern Main Line. Crossrail is primarily an above-ground line, aside from the Central Operating Section (COS); the tunnels that run through London itself.“It’s hard to fathom how there is space in this city to put in new stations, new infrastructure,” says Olga Konopka, Principal Delivery Engineer at Crossrail. In fact, the closest comparator is Paris’ Réseau Express Régional (RER), a series of lines that connect commuter suburbs to the city itself, and then moves people between stops in the city – a railway that acts like a subway when it’s in the middle of a city.One thing that was often repeated was the fact that Crossrail was a project designed to marry the very old and the very new into one seamless whole. “Farringdon was the first part of the Underground,” said Konopka, “we need[ed] to somehow marry up the old and the new, and that’s been the biggest struggle.” And making a 21st century railway run in perfect harmony with a pair of railways built in the Victorian era is one of the reasons that Crossrail’s deadline slipped from 2018 to 2022. “The Great Western was built by [Legendary engineering pioneer Isembard Kingdom] Brunel,” he explained, “and the Great Eastern wasn’t far behind it.” “The technology on those two railways has evolved over many years,” he said “but hasn’t been changed since the ‘60s or ‘70s.”Britain’s railways, including the two main lines that Crossrail connects, use an antiquated, analog signaling system to communicate hazard warnings to drivers.