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Article snippet: LONDON — Up an alley, beyond some hoarding, through what can feel like Harry Potter’s secret portal, the underworld of an unfinished Crossrail station sprawls beneath the traffic and commotion of Tottenham Court Road. Escalator banks descend through a sleek, silent black ticket hall where towering, empty, white-tiled passageways snake toward the new, vaulted train platform, curving like a half moon into the subterranean darkness. Crossrail is not your average subway. London’s $20 billion is Europe’s biggest infrastructure project. It will be so fast that crucial travel times across the city should be cut by more than half. The length of two soccer pitches, with a capacity for 1,500 people, its trains will be able to carry twice the number of passengers as an ordinary London subway. While Londoners love to moan about their public transit network, by comparison New York has barely managed to construct four subway stops in about a half-century and its aged, rapidly collapsing subway system now threatens to bring the city to a halt. But standing one recent morning on that empty Crossrail platform, where construction workers in orange gear and hard hats hauled shiny metal panels to line the walls, I still couldn’t help wondering whether the new train leads toward another glorious era for this city, or signals the end of one. Before Britain voted last summer to leave the European Union, Crossrail was conceived for a London open to the world and speeding into the future... Link to the full article to read more