Exclusive photos of inside the soon-to-open Crossrail route

Whisper it: Crossrail, the mega-project that’s been in construction since 2009, will soon be complete. Transport bosses hope that once it’s finished, people will forget the four-year delay and the £4 billion in cost over-runs. I think they may be right.

MyLondon toured the soon-to-open Paddington-Abbey Wood stretch this week, which got reporters from Paddington station to Canary Wharf in just over 15 minutes. It is astonishingly quick, airy and spacious. So spacious that three Wembley Stadiums and the Shard would fit comfortably inside Paddington station, Crossrail chief Mark Wild told media on Monday.

In Mark Wild’s words, it is “not a tube line: it’s a new mode of transport.” There is nothing like it in the UK. We start in the glass-topped concourse of the new Paddington station, built using the same brick firm Brunel used to construct the 1850’s station next door.

READ MORE: Elizabeth Line: Crossrail could be just a ‘few weeks’ from opening

The platforms are enormous. Paddington’s is 20m below ground. and 208m long. It is a beast of subterranean engineering. The trains use floor-to-ceiling platform screen doors, allowing safety bods to prevent tunnel fires from spreading into the platforms.

You may have already seen the carriages themselves: they are the same trains used on TfL Rail, the Heathrow to Paddington bit of Crossrail that’s already open.

Paddington connects to the Bakerloo line via a massive tunnel, which cost £1m per metre to build. You’d think they could buy some art for it at that cost, but I’ll save my grumbles for another time.

Of course, the journey times are super-fast. I had to cut my interview with TfL boss Andy Byford short, as we had made it from Liverpool Street to Canary Wharf in seven minutes. They should have slowed it down for us, really.

You may have seen the carriages already: they’re the same trains that TfL Rail runs from Paddington to Heathrow, and Paddington to Reading. It’s a good colour, though I can’t imagine the white staying white for long.

There are no loos, which could be an issue for Reading passengers heading to East London, but Andy Byford assures us it won’t be an issue: those customers will be few and far between. And so, after just 17 minutes, we landed in Canary Wharf and its sleek black concourse. The yellow is meant to represent the yellow of ‘canaries’, apparently.

Londoners may have already seen the Canary Wharf station – or not, as it’s tucked away behind One Canada Square. It blends in to the eerily artificial, spaceship vibe of Canary Wharf itself. There are just weeks to go before all this is open, to 170 million passengers a year.

The last major simulation of full operations of the new Elizabeth Line – the name of the project when complete – took place on Sunday (March 13), paving the way for a potential April launch. The test involved 1,600 volunteers using the new central stretch from Paddington-Abbey Wood to stress-test the system in the run-up to launch day.

You’ll have to wait a bit longer for the rest of Crossrail to open: the other (separate) lines to the Paddington-Abbey Wood route are due to be joined up over the next year, running from Heathrow and Reading to Paddington, and Shenfield to Liverpool Street.

It has to be said, for all the waiting, TfL is doing a pretty good job of building excitement for this project. You’ll soon be able to judge whether the waiting has been worth it. All I can say for now is this: non-Londoners are going to be rather jealous of this costly, delayed, glorious project.

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