THE SECRET PLATFORM
Deep beneath London’s streets, miners are working 24/7 on Europe’s biggest infrastructure project, writes Nathalie Thomas
SIX flights of stairs below a muddy construction yard, next to the Billingsgate fish market in East London, a gang of 20 miners, their faces smeared with mud, are darting along metal platforms wedged between the sides of a cavernous tunnel and a giant cylindrical machine that stretches as far as the eye can see.
The atmosphere is muggy and there’s a thick smell of clay, as a giant Archimedes screw is spewing out earth that has been dug from the tunnel face just a few metres away.
These miners are operating a 146m-long, 1 000-ton beast nicknamed “Elizabeth”, which is slowly but surely digging its way from Canary Wharf to Stepney Green by the end of the year and then on to Whitechapel and Liverpool Street. Its final destination is Farringdon by the end of next year.
From the surface of Canary Wharf, where office workers scurry between the glass-clad headquarters of some of the world’s biggest banks, there are no clues that beneath their feet, miners are working 24 hours a day, seven days a week on Europe’s biggest infrastructure project.
This is Crossrail, London’s newest railway line, which will connect Maidenhead and Heathrow to the west of the capital to Shenfield and Abbey Wood in the east via a 119km route.
The project, which has been almost 40 years in the making, will be completed in 2019 but London’s commuters will be able to start using much of the new network from the end of 2018.
Plans for a new railway across London date back as far as the 19th century but Crossrail, in its present form, was first mooted as part of a study into London’s railway system in 1974.
Following decades of deliberation by successive governments, work on the scheme finally started in May 2009 but it has lived in the shadows of more glamorous infrastructure projects, such as the London 2012 Olympics.
At a cost of £14.8-billion, compared with the near £9-billion cost of the Olympics and the £1.5-billion price tag for the London Gateway “super port” in the Thames Estuary, Crossrail dwarfs all other recent infrastructure projects in the UK. Only High Speed Rail 2, which according to the government’s estimates will cost £43-billion, will be bigger, if it receives the go-ahead to start construction in 2016.
As “Elizabeth” bores into the London clay that supports the capital north of the Thames at an average rate of just over 90m a week, the miners behind are ensuring 30cm-thick concrete segments, which will form the walls of the tunnel, are slotted into place.
Two thirds of the network will use existing rail track but 41km of new tunnels are being constructed beneath some of London’s most built-up areas, including Bond Street, Paddington and Tottenham Court Road, using eight tunnelling machines.
The machines, which are the equivalent length of 14 London buses lined up end to end, have to weave a precise path between sewers, power cables and water mains. Extensive surveys were carried out on existing infrastructure before work began but the machines are fitted with lasers to ensure they don’t hit a major power supply that could plunge large parts of the capital into darkness.
There are other obstacles, too. Near Liverpool Street, a near 500-year-old graveyard was unearthed, which is believed to hold the remains of as many as 4 000 people — many of whom came from the notorious Bethlem Hospital, the world’s first lunatic asylum, better known as “Bedlam”.
Workers also had temporarily to drain part of Royal Docks to expand a Victorian tunnel for the project. —