Crossrail is finally here: we must all get behind it

After decades of planning the £16bn Crossrail scheme is at last at the start line. Time to celebrate, time to get to work, says NCE editor Antony Oliver

Hats off to the Crossrail team this week. Achieving Royal Assent for the Hybrid Bill and so moving from project promotion to actual project delivery really is, as transport secretary Ruth Kelly described it, a "landmark" achievement.
Not least because, despite being talked about for so long as the missing piece in the capital's transport infrastructure, until now this project has remained politically and financially rooted in the "too difficult" basket.
And given the current pressures on the UK's public finances, the decision to press ahead with this transformational £15.9bn, ten year investment can only really be described as the result of bold leadership by all the project's stakeholders.
"It all goes back to the fundamental, that Crossrail is needed – the fact that you have an economic problem is not the reason not to start that job," Crossrail executive chairman Doug Oakervee told NCE this week.
It is the kind of common sense that civil engineers have continued to remind successive governments – that decent modern transport infrastructure is the lifeblood of economic activity. Crossrail will underpin the capital's £12.7bn annual contribution to the UK's public finances, create 14,000 jobs during construction and 1000 permanent jobs once open. And Oakervee intends that it will also act as the catalyst to create an engineering skills legacy in some of the most deprived parts of the capital.
Yet as Oakervee also knows, this kind of common sense isn't actually that common – particularly at the Treasury. To ensure that his "fundamental" was not so easily ignored he worked hard to help all the project's political masters, across all party lines, understand the benefits as well as the costs.
It is a model of engagement that harks back to Brunellian times and that we must learn from – how to make elected politicians and government officials feel comfortable about large scale infrastructure investments.
Of course, despite the assurances that the funding packages are in place and that the planning has been worked out to ensure that the budget is met, a great deal of hard and detailed work will be required to bring this project in for a 2017 opening.
That is the next challenge. The whole industry will have to embrace this project and prove that we really are up to delivering such so-called "grand projets".
As Crossrail managing director Keith Berryman, the man who has guided the project through Parliament, told his team this week: "I think we should allow ourselves just a few moments to congratulate ourselves before beginning the real job of building a world class and affordable railway."
I think that everyone in civil engineering would agree.