Want to know what’s going right in Britain? Come to the capital, look at the Elizabeth line railway | Jonn Elledge

It’s a ‘can-do’ object lesson for the Treasury. And imagine what such ambition could do for the fortunes of Birmingham, Manchester or LeedsAnother week, another piece of good news concerning London’s newest railway. This time it’s a timetable update showing that the Saturday service on the core section of the Elizabeth line will increase from 16 to 20 trains an hour. From December, there will be a train every three minutes between Paddington and Whitechapel, higher than the normal off-peak frequency, just in time for your Christmas shopping. OK, it’s hardly world peace or a custodial sentence for the people who keep adding AI to search engines, but in 2025 you take what you can get.There are two competing narratives about what, in happier times, we used to know as Crossrail. The first and most familiar is a litany of complaints. The new line took for ever to happen, even by the standards of such things: an east-west heavy rail tunnel linking Paddington and Liverpool Street was first proposed mere weeks after the conclusion of the Blitz, and as far back as the 1990s information leaflets about the plan were appearing at outer London stations and exciting some of the cooler local teenagers. But the route didn’t actually get the nod until 2008, at almost exactly the point someone in the offices of Lehman Brothers was asking: “So, when you say sub-prime …”Jonn Elledge is an author and former assistant editor of the New Statesman Continue reading...

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