Hi everybody, Mark Wild CEO Crossrail here and i'm very pleased to give you a quarterly
update on progress on our program and a look ahead to what the next several months hold
for us. I'm speaking to you today from our new Tottenham Court Road station. We handed
this over to London Underground on the 5th of May. Very exciting moment for us all. I'm
here with my face mask on because, actually, this is an operational railway now and progressively
we will hand over more stations as we get into the summer months. We're in the phase
of Trial Running now so today we are running four trains per hour timetable service, leaving
our Old Oak Common depot, going between Paddington and Abbey Wood and that process is really
enabled because we transitioned to an operational railway at the end of March. We also commissioned
the Great Western interface to National Rail and the Great Eastern interface. So we've
created a new railway in the UK, fully connected at each end to the National Rail service and
transitioned to a new phase where the maintainers and operators of the future system are now
actively maintaining and operating this system. We're presently running 4 trains an hour at
the moment. We step that up to 8 trains an hour then 12 trains an hour. We do that to
prove the reliability of the system and shake out all of the problems. We aim to be at 12
trains an hour, which is the opening service pattern of the Elizabeth line, we aim to be
there in the next two to three months so it's a very exciting time for the program. It's
going pretty well at the moment but obviously the reason we do this is to shake out all
of the bugs so when customers finally join this railway they will be assured of a very
reliable and of course a very safe process. Once we are at 12 trains an hour we will also
then conduct some timetable demonstrations because although this railway will open at
12 trains an hour, its full capability is 24 trains an hour when we bring trains from
the east and the west end to complete the Elizabeth line. Those timetable demonstrations
will be sometime in the summer and that is a precursor to the next phase of this program,
the final phase really before opening, which is trial operations. As I said i'm here at
the new Tottenham Court Road station. It joins Custom House and Farringdon as stations that
have been handed over to TfL. In the coming months we will handover Liverpool Street,
Paddington and Woolwich to give us six of the nine central stations which leaves us
Bond Street, Whitechapel and of course Canary Wharf to complete the set. In recent weeks
Acton Main Line and West Ealing have been opened as refurbished stations and achieved
step free access status. This week Ealing Broadway will join them. I'm sure local communities
will really appreciate the new facilities and of course access to greater accessibility
to our railway. Later in the summer we will welcome Hayes & Harlington, Southall and West
Drayton to that group, something really to look forward to. We are running our full-length
units, our 9 car 345 trains into Liverpool Street surface station. That's been possible
because we've extended the platforms at Liverpool Street to cater for our largest train. Big
step forward for the program and i'm sure customers in the east will look forward to
riding on those soon. I hope this update reassures everybody watching this that we are actually
making great, tangible progress on this program as we drive towards the start of Trial Operations
later this year and opening this railway in the first half of 2022. We'll do our very
best to get as open as early as possible in that window because we know how much opening
the Elizabeth line means for London's recovery. Thank you very much.