Crossrail is also Europe's largest construction project - some of the numbers ar...

Crossrail is also Europe's largest construction project - some of the numbers are incredible, e.g. "Over 3 million tonnes of excavated material from the tunnels was shipped to Wallasea Island in Essex to create a new 1,500 acre RSPB nature reserve"[0]. It also required spending £1bn[1] buying up and demolishing large areas of prime real estate in one of the most densely populated and expensive places in Europe to create 10 brand new stations. Not to mention that "100 archaeologists have found tens of thousands of items from 40 sites, spanning 55 million years"[2]. So the fact that it is more than 10% of the cost of this for a short tunnel under open fields in a sparsely populated area for relatively few people and providing no major new public transport hubs is I think all the more surprising.