Crossrail: transport miracle or public sector folly?

Phyllis has gone to Tottenham Court Road, but Ada is having a day off. In fact she’s slumbering deep below us, just south of Bond Street station with her head under Grays Antique Centre.

Phyllis and Ada are twin sisters, 140 metres long, weighing 1,000 tonnes each. I’m imagining them as domesticated versions of those monstrous sandworms on the planet -Arrakis in Frank Herbert’s Dune, with their crystal teeth and ‘bellows breath of cinnamon’. They are the tunnel-boring machines that are munching through London’s sub-terrain from Royal Oak to Farringdon where, some time in autumn 2014, they will bump into their cousins Elizabeth and Victoria, coming the other way from Limmo Peninsula in Docklands.

And they are the pride of the team who are building Crossrail, the line from Maidenhead and Heathrow in the west to Shenfield and Abbey Wood in the east, due to open in 2018, that is Europe’s biggest construction project and one of London’s liveliest subjects of saloon-bar debate. For its advocates, Crossrail will be a transformative addition to passenger capacity and connectivity across the capital, having served as a £15 billion load of Keynesian fertiliser thanks to its construction during the economic downturn. To its detractors, it’s one more public-sector folly we can’t afford, as well as a massive annoyance for West End businesses, shoppers and residents. I’m on site at Bond Street in hard hat and hi-viz suit to form my own opinion.

My guide is Crossrail chairman Terry Morgan, a veteran of senior posts at BAE Systems, Land Rover and Tube Lines, the entity that runs the Jubilee, Northern and Piccadilly components of the Underground. Now he sits between the contractors doing the digging and the people putting up the money — £7 billion from the Mayor of London, £5 billion from the Chancellor, £2 billion from Network Rail and £1 billion direct from the City and business.