Your commute could be made easier from next week!
The Elizabeth Line is finally set to open to commuters in London next week after a series of delays and disruptions to the Crossrail project.
The new service is expected to drastically cut travel times and ease pressure on the Jubilee Line and other heavily-used links.
Named in honour of the Queen, who visited Paddington Station earlier this week, the £18.8 billion route will be the first new major expansion of the network since the extension of the Northern Line.
The service is set for a phased opening across the next 12 months, which will eventually carry passengers along a 100km route from Reading and Heathrow in the west to Shenfield and Abbey Wood in the east.
The central section – which spans across zones 1-4 – will open on Tuesday, May 24 and operate 12 trains per hour between Paddington and Abbey Wood. The service will cover Monday to Saturday, 06:30am to 11pm. A Sunday service is expected soon after a series of tests and software updates is complete.
Once the line is fully opened, it will span across all nine London zones and just outside of the capital.
Currently, part of the line is already in operation under the name ‘TfL Rail’, where passengers can travel separately from Paddington to Heathrow and Reading, or from Liverpool Street to Shenfield and Abbey.
But on May 24, that section will be rebranded as the Elizabeth Line and commuters will soon be able to travel directly from west to east without having to change in central London.
It is expected to save passengers a significant amount of time when travelling to central London from the commuter belt, with journeys between Abbey Wood and Tottenham Court Road set to be slashed the most – from 51 minutes to just 23 minutes.
Ticket prices on the Elizabeth Line are due to stay in line with current prices for current rail services – inclusive of the fare cap.
The cap for zones 1-6 was bumped up to £14.10 in March for all travel within a 24-hour period, meaning that if you pay £11.60 to travel from Heathrow to Paddington, you will pay up to £2.50 for additional journeys on TfL services on the same day.
On TfL’s website, it says that ‘fares on the Elizabeth line from the east or west into the central section stations will be exactly the same as travelling today to a London Underground station in the same zone as the required Elizabeth line station’.
Zone 1 £7.70
Zones 1 & 2 £7.70
Zones 1-3 £9.00
Zones 1-4 £11.00
Zones 1-5 £13.10
Zones 1-6 £14.10
MORE : Elizabeth Line map: Where you can go and how long it will take from May 24
MORE : Elizabeth Line stations: Where does the new Tube start and finish? See the full list
MORE : Queen makes surprise visit to Paddington to see new Elizabeth Line
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