BTM TALK –CROSSRAIL B
y now most of us will have heard the name Crossrail, but what is it exactly, when will it open and how much will it cost? These and many other questions were sufficient to draw an audience of around 130 to this January Brooklands Trust Members’ Talk on a cold, damp Thursday evening. The talk was given by Richard Storer, Community Relations Manager for the transport link that will be known as the Elizabeth Line, after our current monarch, when it part opens in December of this year.
So let’s start with some statistics. It is a 74-mile long rail line across London, starting at Reading or Heathrow in the west and ending at either Shenfield in Essex or Abbey Wood in south east London. It includes 40 stations, nine of which are completely new, will add 10 per cent capacity to London’s rail system and bring an extra 1.5 million people to within 45 minutes of central London. The cost of £14.8 billion is being funded mostly by the Department for Transport and Transport for London, although other interested parties, such as Canary Wharf and Heathrow Airport, have also contributed. The anticipated benefit is £42 billion to the UK economy. One of the purposes of Richard Storer’s role is not only to publicise the new facility but also to explain exactly what it offers (or does not). During the talk it became clear that Crossrail is a kind of hybrid between a regular rail service and the Underground. It will use normal ‘Metro’ type trains which are much larger than the tube trains, requiring a 6.2-metre diameter tunnel. One of the consequences of this is that the stations will have full height glass protection screens between the trains and platforms (those on the Jubilee Line are only half-tunnel height), otherwise the air pushed down the tunnel by an advancing train would lift people on the platforms off their feet. The trains are 200 metres long, carry 1,500 passengers (450 seated) and have no toilets. The trains will stop at all stations like the Underground and hence some journey times will take longer than today – this is not a high-speed railway service. Much of the presentation concentrated on the construction (currently the largest infrastructure project in Europe) and the difficulties this created. Then London Mayor, Boris Johnson, and Lord Adonis launched the project in May 2009. Many of the problems revolved around the 25 miles of tunnels that it was necessary to cut. In all eight boring machines were used; sadly these were
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Richard Storer of Crossrail (Gareth Tarr).
German as no British company manufactures this type of equipment any more. Digging holes under London of course requires lots of planning. Not only is there existing infrastructure (Underground, Overground, utilities and even the Post Office’s tunnel) to be worked round but there are lots of historic buildings to consider, many with weak foundations. So in many cases before the tunnel was cut it was necessary to create underground support for these buildings using concrete-filled tubes rather like a spider’s web. St Patrick’s Church in Soho Square above Tottenham Court Road station was an example of a building requiring very careful monitoring. Noise considerations above ground also had to be taken into account, in one case additional sound-proofing was added to a building occupied by a financial services company that required quiet surroundings, only for that company to subsequently close the building. This reflects the lengthy construction period, during which the world moves on.
Now you may be wondering what happened to all the soil? Well the RSPB bought low grade arable land at Wallasea Island in Essex to develop as a bird sanctuary and the soil from the Crossrail tunnels is being used to help landscape this development. With help from other sources the sanctuary will be developed over 25 years but already it has seen an increase of an estimated 200,000 birds. Throughout the talk Richard Storer ran through a series of anecdotes and statistics that illustrated the massive size and challenge of the project. It all starts to come to fruition this year with handover from the constructors to Transport for London in July. From then TfL will run trials until the Eliza- beth Line opens on 9th December, the full service becoming operational by December 2019. You can see more information at
http://www.crossrail.co.uk Gareth Tarr
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