Pretty much everyone still calls the Elizabeth line Crossrail

For decades now, the authorities have been planning a new east-west tunnel under London, linking the main line from the west of the capital into Paddington with the main line from the east into Liverpool Street.

And for decades now, this plan has been referred to as Crossrail. The name seems first to have appeared in the 1974 London Rail Study. It was attached to more proposals in the early 1990s.

When construction of the new line was finally approved, it was in the Crossrail Act 2008. The company tasked with building the new line was a wholly owned subsidiary of Transport for London, trading under the name Crossrail Ltd. Another proposed line, which will carry trains on a south-west/north-east axis, from Surrey to Hertfordshire, is currently known by the name Crossrail 2.

So anyway: the new line is called Crossrail. Everybody knows it’s called Crossrail. What else could we possibly call it?

Image: TFL.

Oh.

It’s more than two years ago now that we learned that London’s new railway line would be named the Elizabeth Line, as if naming things after someone who wasn’t dead was in any way a not creepy thing to do in a democracy. The new name will be on tube maps and wayfinding signs. The new line will be the Elizabeth Line, and not Crossrail.

Yet there are signs that this information has yet to filter through to the public at large. Check out this graph showing the popularity search terms since 2004, courtesy of Google Trends. The blue line is searches for “Crossrail”; the red is searches for “Elizabeth line”. See if you can spot the point at the TfL announced the latter of those names.

Click to expand. Image: Google Trends.

That happened in February 2016, so comparing the two names before then is a point pointless. Zoom in on those last two and a bit years, though, and you can see that much the same pattern holds: people are much more likely to search Crossrail than the Elizabeth Line.

Click to expand. Image: Google Trends.

There are two big peaks in searches for “the Elizabeth line”. The first, in February 2016, was when the name was first announced. The second is last December, when TfL first released a tube map showing how the Elizabeth Line would look on the map when it officially comes into being next December. The bump in both search terms, in late May and early June of 2017, coincides with the broadcast of a documentary about the new line, The Fifteen Billion Pound Railway: The Final Countdown.

To be fair, these graph is worldwide. There are other proposals known as Crossrail elsewhere in the world: in Glasgow, Edinburgh and New York, to name but three. So what happens if we just look at the English data?

Click to expand. Image: Google Trends.

Riiiight.

Things will no doubt change once the thing opens, and people encounter the maps and the signage and so on. But as things stand, whatever TfL might think, the new line is still known as Crossrail, as it has been for 44 years.

Incidentally: