Constructing London's $20-billion railway
Crossrail is London's much-anticipated high-speed railway. Europe's biggest infrastructure project is due to open in December 2018 under the name of the Elizabeth Line.
Bore to the core
The eight tunnel boring machines (TBMs) required to construct Crossrail were manufactured at Herrenknecht, a manufacturing company in Germany, and deployed to dig the Thames Tunnel section of the route. Each machine cost around 10 million pounds and operated for 24 hours a day, requiring a team of 20 people to function. One TBM only covers 100 meters a week.
Stepping forward
Representatives from 50 different capital cities and infrastructure organizations have visited London to understand how London has raised 14.8 billion pounds to build the new line. There is also interest in how the project has been pulled off from a engineering point of view, with this key part of the project at Stepney Green, east London, just meters from a popular urban soccer field.
Complex tunnel network
Two years of meticulous planning allowed engineers to tunnel through the optimal route. This included tunneling over or under existing London transport systems on 26 occasions. In total there is now 42 kilometers of new tunnels in the network, each seven meters in diameter. This tunnel at Liverpool Street station will become a major interchange with two other lines.
Royal visit
The Queen has already visited the Bond Street station site of the line that will be named after her. The central section of the line (Paddington to Abbey Wood) will open in December 2018 with whole the line completely open for business in December 2019. The Elizabeth line is funded by a combination of tax revenue, ticket fares and London businesses.
Vision of the future
Around 200 million passengers a year will use the new line and there will be 10 new stations along the route, including this one at Canary Wharf, the first new station to be completed. The journey time from Canary Wharf, in the east, to Heathrow, in the west, will be 40 minutes — cutting 27 minutes off the existing journey time.
In the dock
The 250 meter long Canary Wharf station was built 18 meters below the bed of West India Quay dock. The entire station is surrounded by water and has a 310 metre-long timber lattice roof, covering a roof garden. Over 40 million people currently pass through the station each year, with this section due to ease some of the pressure the city's transport's infrastucture is under.