TUNNEL VISIONARIES
The construction of Crossrail is the largest infrastructure project in Europe and London’s first new railway for over 20 years. It will provide for the first time direct links from Berkshire in the west and Essex in the east into Heathrow, central London and Canary Wharf. Robert Williams reports.
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rossrail will provide a new underground line through central London, running 118km (73 miles) from Maidenhead and Heathrow in the west through 21.5km of new twin bore tunnels through central London and on to Canary Wharf, Woolwich, Abbey Wood and Shenfield in the east. There will be new underground stations at Paddington, Bond Street, Tottenham Court Road, Farringdon, Liverpool Street and Whitechapel. The new railway is designed to initially accommodate 10-carriage trains, but construction is making provision for longer trains in the future, which may well be necessary as it is anticipated that over 200 million passengers will use Crossrail in the first year of operation. Proposals for the construction of a new East-West rail link across London are not new. They were first drawn up shortly after the Second World War. Since then the idea resurfaced from time to time, but nothing 14 Industry Europe
happened until the late 1980s, when the original Crossrail scheme was developed. Meanwhile, London continued to grow, both economically and physically, placing everincreasing demands on its infrastructure. Crossrail is in many ways identical to the Réseau Express Régional (RER) lines in Paris. It will bring passengers in from the suburbs to the heart of the city and continue out to the other side. RER lines absorb many passengers who might otherwise board congested metro lines, which can then more readily accommodate shorter city journeys without high volumes of commuters loading and unloading at each main line terminus. Crossrail is the biggest engineering project in Europe. Main construction works for Crossrail began in 2010, and some preparatory work was carried out in 2009 at the major stations including Tottenham Court Road, Farringdon and Paddington.
At the heart of the project is the construction of a new 21.5km (12 mile) tunnelled route across London. This includes the branch of the eastern end to Shenfield and Abbey Wood. Portals for the main tunnels have been built at Royal Oak to the west of Paddington and in the east at Custom House and Pudding Mill Lane. All of this adds up to 42km of bored tunnels located below the busy streets of London. The tunnels will weave their way between existing underground lines, sewers, utility tunnels and building foundations from station to station at depths of up to 40m. The first two tunnel boring machines (TBMs) are about to start out on their journey from Royal Oak towards the west of Farringdon station. The TBMs, built in Germany, each weigh 1000 tonnes and are longer than a football pitch. In March, the first of eight of these giant machines will start burrowing under
