As far back as the late nineteenth century schemes were being explored to enable the railways to penetrate right into and through central London.

Isambard Kingdom Brunel is credited with the first idea of trains crossing London. Great Western trains were planned to run underground at Paddington. They were not viable and withdrawn.

In 1836 Robert Stephenson (co-inventor with his father George of the Rocket and engineer of the London & Birmingham Railway) had prepared plans to extend his newly completed main line beyond the Euston terminus in tunnel under Gower Street and Covent Garden to the Savoy Wharf on the Thames.

However, due to the problems of running steam traction below ground these schemes never reached fruition.

With the invention of electric traction it became possible to promote and build underground railways in London.

With the limitations of tunnelling technology in the late 19th and early 20th centuries these were mostly built to "Tube-gauge" diameter, preventing their connection to the fast expanding commuter and express railways above ground.

These Tube-gauge lines now form the backbone of today's London Underground network.

Throughout the 20th century the Underground grew, and so did London. The Railway Companies continued to deliver passengers to the termini at the edges of the business districts and the passengers continued their journeys on the Underground.

By the late 1980s it was clear that options to run more trains over existing tracks were reaching the limits of capacity. The Government then commissioned a study to investigate how this problem could be solved.

The Central London Rail Study of 1989 proposed three projects, East-West Crossrail (now Crossrail Line 1), a new Underground line to link Wimbledon and Hackney (now Crossrail Line 2) and an extension of the Jubilee line.

Work was started by London Transport and British Rail to develop these schemes.

In 1991, a Bill was submitted to Parliament for the East-West scheme. Unfortunately, in 1994 the bill was rejected as the then recession temporarily depressed passenger journeys into and through the capital.

Despite the decision not to proceed, the government issued Safeguarding Directions to protect the alignments of the lines through Central London, to ensure that no developments would be built which would prevent the schemes from being built.

In 2000, with both the Underground and National Rail networks now suffering record levels of congestion and a resulting decline in service reliability, the Government asked the Strategic Rail Authority (SRA) to study the requirements for extra passenger capacity to and through London.

The London East West Study, prepared in response to that request, sets out the issues such as network capacity, congestion, growth and regeneration. It identifies a programme consisting of complementary and incremental projects that will create a railway network appropriate to London's status as a World City.

The Study recommended that both the East-West and Hackney-SouthWest routes be resurrected and schemes developed to construct them.

[To read the study in full, please view the download file. To view this file, you will need Adobe Acrobat Reader. This file is 1.2MB in size and could take approximately 4 minutes to download or open over a 56K modem.]

To achieve this aim a unique 50/50 Joint Venture company was formed in 2001 which is now owned by Transport for London and the Department for Transport. This company - Cross London Rail Links Ltd (CLRL) - is responsible for defining the routes, as well as developing and promoting these two new railway routes.