Archive for the ‘Crossrail’ Category

In a bid to get the local community involved in the mammoth Crossrail tunnelling project, Crossrail is inviting people to take part a new competition to find names for each of the tunnel boring machines due to begin tunnelling in a few weeks time.

Entrants have until February to think up a pair of names for each pair of tunnel boring machines. A Crossrail judging panel will then produce a shortlist of names and publish them for the general public to make the final decision by way of a vote.

Andy Mitchell, Crossrail Programme Director says: “This competition is a chance for Londoners and those living along the Crossrail route to suggest the names of the tunnel boring machines that will construct the major new rail tunnels under London. In years to come the winners of the competition will be able to travel on Crossrail and not only say they named the machines that built the tunnels but that they watched history unfold as tunnelling started.”

The winning entries will be announced in March and the lucky winners will be able to see their chosen names painted on the Crossrail tunnel boring machines before they head underground to dig the Crossrail tunnels beneath London. The winners of the competition will also be able to choose between Eurostar tickets or a family pass to the Merlin Theme Parks. The winners will also be invited to come along to the launch of the first pair of tunnel boring machines at the Crossrail Royal Oak portal.

The first of the TBM pairs will be launched in spring. The gigantic tunnel boring machines will tunnel from Royal Oak to Farringdon, where they are expected to arrive in summer 2013. The next pair of TBMs will be launched from Docklands later on this year, and the final pair is due to be launched from Plumstead at the end of the year.

Early tunnelling preparation work on the Crossrail project has been well underway for months now, but the end is nearly in sight and tunnelling construction is scheduled to begin in March. Crossrail will be using gigantic tunnel boring machines made by German company, Herrenknecht, and costing £14.8 billion each. Testing on the TBMs has now been completed and the first of the giant behemoths is already on its way over to the UK, ready to be reassembled for the start of work at Crossrail’s Royal Oak portal in west London.

The tunnelling section of the Crossrail project will continue night and day until the last of the tunnels have been excavated. Teams of twenty tunnelling operatives, trained at the brand new Crossrail Tunnelling Academy, will work 24/7 to ensure work stays on schedule. More than six million tonnes of earth will be excavated by the tunnel boring machines as they burrow away beneath London, most of which will be transported to Essex for use in the construction of a new nature reserve at Wallasea Island.

The tunnel boring machines will move forwards at a rate of one hundred metres per week and as they progress, concrete reinforcement rings will be put in place to line each of the Crossrail tunnels. These concrete segments are being specially constructed at a purpose built factory in west London and are so large that it takes one month for each segment to set completely hard. Approximately a quarter of a million concrete segments will be needed by Crossrail and in order to cope with the demand, a further two factories will be built.

The Crossrail project is creating many new jobs, particularly in the construction industry, but not all local businesses are pleased—many have been subjected to compulsory purchase orders in order to make way for Crossrail construction work in the area.

With less than one hundred days to go before the first tunnel drive on the Crossrail project, Crossrail has finally unveiled the first of its giant tunnel boring machines. The TBM is now fully assembled and is currently being put through some rigorous tests at the factory in Germany before it is dismantled once again and shipped to the UK in time to begin tunnelling.

Crossrail will be using a total of eight tunnel boring machines to complete the tunnelling section of the Crossrail project, all of which are being constructed by Herrenknecht AG. This is the same German company that was responsible for supplying tunnel boring machines to work on the Docklands Light Railway Extension project as well as the Jubilee Line extension.

The first stage of tunnelling is scheduled to begin in March next year and the first of the Crossrail TBMs will begin tunnelling at the Crossrail Royal Oak portal. Another tunnel boring machine will also be sent underground from the Royal Oak portal a few weeks after the first TBM. Further tunnelling launches will commence from Limmo Peninsula at the end of 2012, and thereafter there will be TBM launches in 2013 and 2014.

In total, there are ten separate tunnel drives planned for the Crossrail route and by the time the tunnel boring machines have completed their mammoth schedule of work, 21 kilometres of tunnel will have been bored beneath London. The completed tunnels will be 6.2 metres in diameter and as each TBM progresses slowly, pre-cast concrete rings will be put in place behind them. In order to ensure there is a ready supply of concrete for the Crossrail project, a concrete segment factory has been built at Old Oak Common. Once tunnelling is underway, the tunnel boring machines will be working 24/7 with no breaks expect for scheduled maintenance work.

In the last few days, Crossrail has made its final announcement in respect of the Whitechapel and Farringdon Crossrail station contracts. As previously predicted in the press, the C435 Farringdon Station Crossrail contract has been awarded to the Ferrovial Agroman, Kier Construction and Bam Nuttall joint venture team and the C512 Whitechapel Station Crossrail contract was won by the Vinci Construction, Balfour Beatty and Morgan Sindall joint venture team. Construction on both Crossrail stations is expected to start early next year.

The first of the Crossrail station contracts, Paddington station, was awarded earlier this year. Construction contracts for the final three Crossrail stations will be awarded at some point next year. These include Liverpool Street, Tottenham Court Road and Bond Street.

Construction work in the new Whitechapel Crossrail station will take place north of the existing station. Plans are in place for a ticket hall and passengers will enjoy step free access to the new Crossrail line, plus the existing London Underground and Overground services. Local residents will also enjoy a new pedestrian route around the station.

Farringdon Crossrail Station will eventually be one of the busiest stations in London as it will serve the London Underground and the Thameslink service as well as the new Crossrail high speed rail link. Passengers joining the Crossrail line at Farringdon station will be able to reach Heathrow Airport in thirty one minutes and there will also be fast access to Gatwick Airport and Luton Airport.

Work on the new Crossrail high speed rail link appears to be progressing well and so far everything is on schedule. Work on the first Crossrail tunnel portal, Pudding Lane, has been completed. The giant tunnel boring machines that will be used for the tunnelling work are currently in the process of being manufactured and should be delivered in good time for tunnelling work to start next spring.

If recent reports in the press are correct, it looks likely that Crossrail is about to award two more of the lucrative Crossrail station contracts on the £14.9 billion Crossrail high speed rail scheme.

The £250 million Paddington Station Crossrail contract was awarded in July if this year to a Skanska / Costain joint venture team and the next two up for grabs are Farringdon Station contract and Whitechapel Station works contract. Together these are worth a total of £625 million.

Inside sources believe that the Kier, Bam Nuttall and Ferrovial Agroman joint venture consortium are likely to be the winning bidders on the C345 Farringdon Station Crossrail contract worth an estimated £375 million. The other contract expected to be announced very shortly is the C512 Whitechapel works contract worth £250 million and it is believed that the Balfour Beatty, Vinci and Morgan Sindall joint venture team are the winning bidders on this Crossrail contract.

Previously Crossrail stated that announcements regarding the Whitechapel Station and Farringdon Station contracts would be made at the end of this year, but it appears that Crossrail have already made their decision and things have been moved forwards by a few weeks. The last three remaining Crossrail station contracts are expected to be announced next year. These include Liverpool Street Station worth £300 million, Tottenham Court Road Station contract worth £200 million, and the Bond Street Station contract worth £200 million.

In other news this week, Crossrail has invited tenders on the Custom House contract, a design and build contract worth around £35 million. The successful bidder will be expected to demolish the existing structure, build a new station entrance, construct a passenger foot bridge to the conference centre, and build a new section of railway line.

Engineers working for the Costain Skanska Joint Venture team on the Crossrail Bond Street station in Mayfair, central London, are very pleased with the progress being made on the advanced works for the project. Two out of a total of five compensation grout shafts have now been completed and work has already begun on the next two shafts; these are due for completion by Christmas 2011.

Compensation grouting shafts at the Crossrail Bond Street station are necessary to help protect neighbouring properties from problems caused by ground settlement once tunnelling and box excavation begins on the site of the Crossrail station. The compensation grouting shafts are being excavated to a depth of seventeen metres and concrete reinforcement rings are sunk one metre at a time. Excavated material from the shaft is removed using cranes and sloop is pushed down between the concrete rings and surrounding soil as a fluid support.

The team of engineers at the Crossrail Bond Street station site have already faced a number of unexpected challenges, including discovering a large concrete structure buried underground. This was thought to be an old cellar filled with concrete, but it had to be painstakingly removed in order for work to progress. In a second delay, an unmarked pipe was found, and until local utility companies confirmed that the pipe was no longer in use, work once again ground to a halt.

Other issues faced by the team include the close proximity of the site to many buildings in the heart of Mayfair. Consequently, the engineer in charge of the compensation grout shafts has had a logistical nightmare and has had to plan materials delivery schedules and plant selection extremely carefully in order to avoid disruption to residents and businesses in the local area.

Hillingdon Council planning department has now approved provisional plans for a new flyover as part of a Crossrail link between West Drayton and Hayes and Heathrow Airport. Work on the early infrastructure for the project will soon be underway and the site clearance is expected to begin within the next few weeks. Once the project has been completed, passengers will be able to enjoy a fast link to Heathrow Airport via the Crossrail network.

The project will involve construction of a new rail flyover as part of a Crossrail branch line extension to Heathrow Airport. The Crossrail link to Heathrow will leave the main section of track between Hayes and West Drayton, cross the new flyover, and then continue underground. As well as the planned rail flyover, other essential work on the Crossrail project includes the construction of new overhead lines, perimeter fencing, lighting, and of course new rail track. Two ponds south of the main site will also need to be filled in to make way for the new flyover.

Crossrail work sites have been set up on local industrial sites in the area and preliminary work will be starting shortly. Since the construction work on the Crossrail Heathrow link will be taking place in industrial areas, residential homes are unlikely to be affected by the noise of construction traffic entering and leaving the work sites, but it is very likely that roads in the vicinity of the sites will be affected by closures and sheer volume of traffic.

The £15 billion Crossrail high speed rail project is already well underway and Crossrail tunnelling work will start next spring. Once the Crossrail project has reached completion in 2018, passengers will be able to enjoy a high speed rail link between east and west London.

Developers have recently submitted plans for an exciting new revamp of the area that surrounds the Tottenham Court Road Crossrail station in London. Back in 2009, to make room for the Crossrail development of Tottenham Court Road station, the iconic Astoria theatre was demolished. However, plans for a new 350-seat theatre, shops, offices, and flats have been submitted to Westminster Borough Council.

Tottenham Court Road Crossrail station will play an important part in the new Crossrail high speed rail network as travellers will be able to pass to and from the tube lines and Crossrail trains at Tottenham Court Road. To this end, Tottenham Court Station is currently being expanding to make way for Crossrail facilities.

As part of this expansion work, developers are now hoping to revamp the area surrounding the station. These plans include a new theatre to replace the old Astoria, plus four new blocks of offices, flats and shops at various points in the vicinity of Tottenham Court Crossrail station.

One nine-storey block will be constructed above the station itself, and will include nine floors of office units and three floors of shops. A further block will be built on Charing Cross road and will be comprised of offices, flats, and shops, plus the new theatre. Another two blocks are also planned for development on Dean Street and Oxford Street, and will include flats and shops.

Work on Crossrail is moving forward quickly and work on the tunnelling phase of the Crossrail project will begin next spring when TBMs move in and start excavating beneath the city of London. The high speed Crossrail network should be ready for its first passengers in 2018 and commuters will be able to travel from Maidenhead and Brentwood across central London to Abbey Wood.

Sources from Transport for London have expressed concern that the government’s proposed plans for Crossrail to secure funding from private funding initiatives (PFI contracts), could cost UK taxpayers a lot more in the long term.

Crossrail intends to use private funding initiatives to purchase new rolling stock, but the mayor of London, Boris Johnson, believes that the necessary funding should come from the state as opposed to private investors. Boris’s views were recently made public in a confidential memo from Transport for London officials, a memo based on Transport for London’s experiences with private finding initiatives during the London tube upgrades.

Following agreements made with the Department of Transport in the wake of the public spending review last year, Transport for London are not allowed to borrow more than a set amount from the government. However, Boris Johnson is hoping to persuade the Treasury department and government to give Crossrail the go-ahead to borrow the necessary funds from the state to buy Crossrail carriages instead of relying on private funding initiatives.

According to a report issued by the Treasury department, the main reason for argument is the “…significant widening of the gap between the cost of finance under a private-financed concession compared with the public sectors…”

As such, Boris Johnson and Transport for London are arguing that borrowing money from the state to help fund Crossrail carriage purchases will be significantly cheaper than borrowing the funds from private investors since PFI contracts could easily add a 70% premium to the cost of the Crossrail projects in the pipeline, which is clearly not good value for Crossrail or the British taxpayer.

Boris is confident that as long as public procurement is handled sensibly, Crossrail will reap the benefits. There has also been suggestion by some industry insiders that the last UK train factory, Bombardier, would also benefit from access to public funding.

The Costain-Skanska joint venture partnership were awarded the Crossrail Royal Oak civils contract back in 2010, and now, almost one month ahead of schedule, the Royal Oak portal has been handed over to Crossrail.

There have been many problems for the Skanska-Costain project team to deal with whilst working on the Crossrail Royal Oak site. During the site excavation, live electrical cables and other utilities were never very far away and the workers were often very close to live rail and tube lines. There are also several bridges and tunnels in close proximity to the Royal Oak site, and as the Costain-Skanska project manager recently commented, “We were no more than three metres away from the Hammersmith & City line on one side and the A40 on the other, with three bridges overhanging at the side, so space was extremely tight.”

Despite the exceptionally challenging conditions at the Royal Oak portal construction site, Costain-Skanska are very proud to have completed their work ahead of schedule. The first Crossrail portal to have reached completion was a massively complex undertaking for the contractor as more than twenty five thousands cubic metres of soil needed to be excavated in order to create steel ring supported openings large enough for the giant tunnel boring machines to access next year. With the A40 to the north and several major rail and tube lines to the south, building the Crossrail portal has been something of a logistical nightmare.

The first stage of construction of the Crossrail tunnels is due to begin next spring. Tunnel boring machines will begin their task at the Royal Oak portal and from there major tunnelling work will commence.

Crossrail Royal Oak is the first of the Crossrail portals to reach completion. Trains will transition from Royal Oak into and out of the London Crossrail network. The next Crossrail portal, Pudding Lane, will be completed in 2012.