> "It was alleged that this was done deliberately by the subcontractors to create additional paid work." I don't entirely doubt this. I actually briefly lived

> "It was alleged that this was done deliberately by the subcontractors to create additional paid work." I don't entirely doubt this. I actually briefly lived in a flat overlooking the Hayes & Harlington station works some years ago. And also used to often commute to the Prince Regent DLR station which had a good view of the Crossrail works at Custom House. In both cases, as far as I could tell, progress was very slow with typically large amounts of idle workers and equipment sitting around (workers on-site but seemingly without much to do!). > "They were having this exact problem on the jubilee line." And Crossrail's signalling is, of course, much more complicated compared to the self-contained Jubilee line because of the need for interoperation with the wider rail network and for trains to run on 3(!) totally different signalling systems: Siemens' proprietary TrainGuard ATO on the central (Paddington-Abbey Wood) section, traditional British TPWS & AWS on the Reading and Stratford branches, and ETCS on the Heathrow branch. I can certainly imagine that getting all of these systems to work together has been a systems integration nightmare, so it's worrying that they seem to be struggling just to get the core Paddington-Abbey Wood section running in self-contained operation!