NOVA: "London Super Tunnel" (WGBH, PBS, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I watched a sporadically interesting NOVA episode called “London Super Tunnel,” which is something of a misnomer because it’s a major expansion of the London Underground (also colloquially known as “The Tube”), the world’s oldest subway system that involved building multiple new tunnels and stations. The Underground was first constructed and opened in 1863, which begs the question of how the trains were powered then. According to Google, it was equipped with “gas-lit wooden carriages hauled by steam locomotives,” which must have made for some unpleasant smells inside the tunnels. It originally ran between two stations, Farringdon and Paddington, and the current expansion is officially called “Crossrail” and is designed both to link up with the existing Underground and to expand its capacity. The project was first launched in 2006 by Boris Johnson, then mayor of London and later architect of “Brexit,” British prime minister and ultimately forced out of that job in disgrace after he wilfully ignored the ban on mass gatherings during the COVID-19 lockdown to host large parties. (Johnson got to be mayor in the first place by defeating Ken Livingstone, one of my personal heroes, in a particularly nasty re-election campaign that anticipated Donald Trump and his slash-and-burn approach to politics.) The show was filled with various characters involved in the construction of the new system and the massive computerization needed to run the new trains effectively, including one man named “Pradeep” who designed and wrote the software for the system and had to deal with the inevitable glitches – though he wasn’t shown much on screen and most of the interviews about the software were done with his assistant, a man named Rory Mitchell. (I specified his sex because “Rory” is a bi-gendered name.)

Needless to say, the software glitched badly on its first official test, in which four trains got stuck behind each other because the part of the software that was supposed to keep them apart failed big-time. What struck me most about the project was the contrast between the overall massiveness and the delicacy required in the actual execution. One station required a glass wall that had to be built in segments, sent in to the station on what amounted to a freight train, and then assembled to tolerances of a fraction of an inch – much like the way the huge Cinerama images were created by cameras with lenses the size of a contact lens. The project began construction in 2008 and was finally ready to be opened to the public in May 2022, following an official dedication ceremony presided over by the late Queen Elizabeth II in one of her last public appearances before her death on September 8, 2022. The Crossrail line, or at least the part of it that actually opened in May 2022, was formally called the “Elizabeth Line” in her honor. One of the most interesting people shown in the documentary was Linda Miller, an American-born woman who supervised the construction of the Farringdon station; just how she ended up in charge of a major subway project in the U.K. wasn’t all that clear, but there she was, and as a general principle it’s nice to see women and men work alongside each other in projects that have historically been male-only. The big problems involved in the construction were doing this in the middle of an incredibly busy and crowd-filled city (no doubt building the original Underground in 1863 was far less intrusive) and making sure the large tunnels didn’t collapse before the concrete was laid to hold them in place. One section had to be braced with 40 cross-beams, called “props,” and once the concrete was poured each prop had to be cut up laboriously and removed piece by piece.

One unexpected crisis came up because one of the tunnels had to be run under Barbican Hall, essentially London’s version of Lincoln Center in New York: a prestigious theatre that hosts live plays and concerts of classical music. To keep the noise of the subway trains from disrupting performances at Barbican Hall, the engineers involved in Crossrail worked out a system that essentially laid concrete slabs on giant metal springs, sort of like shock absorbers, to smooth out the vibrations of the passing trains so the noise wouldn’t disrupt Barbican shows. Not surprisingly given its size and scope, the Crossrail project ran four billion pounds over budget – it was originally supposed to cost 14.8 billion pounds and was scheduled to open in December 2018; in fact it cost 18.8 billion pounds (about $23.6 billion) and opened in May 2022. The initial Crossrail line was designed to reduce the travel time from Heathrow Airport, London’s main airport and the largest one in the world, to central London from an hour to 27 minutes,and that’s what it did. “London Super Tunnel” is a good show depicting the trials and tribulations of big infrastructure projects, though I can’t help but think it could never (or almost never) happen in the U.S. because the American Right would oppose it as a giant government boondoggle and an assault on the sacred “right” of individuals to travel in their own private cars, the environment and the general efficiency of public transit be damned. I’ll never forget the comment of the late Senator Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma) on the California high-speed rail project to the effect that he had helped kill all the other high-speed rail proposals in the U.S. and he’d kill that one, too.