2012: the most exciting year yet for Crossrail

2012 is going to be the most exciting year yet for the £14.8 billion Crossrail project with construction moving up a few gears as we enter our tunnelling phase.

The year has started with great expectations and excitement for the project not just within Crossrail but also amongst Londoners who have responded in thousands to our Tunnel Boring Machine (TBM) naming competition to suggest names and vote for their favourite ones. The Prime Minister has personally shown interest in the progress of the project and Crossrail’s apprenticeship programme, too; visiting Crossrail sites and facilities earlier this year.

Crossrail is now becoming more and more visible across London. At Paddington Station, we recently opened a brand new taxi-rank at the Red Star Deck which was previously on Eastbourne Terrace. Work is in now starting at the Eastbourne Terrace site to construct the Crossrail Paddington Station box to receive the TBMs that will start tunnelling from Royal Oak Portal.

Once complete, Crossrail will be the largest addition to the London and South East transport network for 50 years and it will increase the railbased public transport capacity in London by 10%. Crossrail will run 118km from Maidenhead and Heathrow in the west, through new twinbore 21km tunnels under central London to Shenfield and Abbey Wood in the east.

Crossrail will connect the City, Canary Wharf, the West End and Heathrow Airport to commuter areas east and west of the capital and will help an extra 1.5 million people to access London’s major employment and retail centres.

Over the last year, the Crossrail project has made good progress. Work is underway at all central London station sites, the excavation of Canary Wharf station has concluded and main construction contracts have been awarded for Farringdon, Paddington and Whitechapel stations. Shortlisted bidders for the Custom House Station have recently been announced. The remaining contracts for Bond Street, Tottenham Court Road and Liverpool Street stations will be awarded by the first quarter of 2013.

Europe’s largest construction project is ready to start tunnelling from March with the first two TBMs setting off from Royal Oak in west London driving to Farringdon. In preparation for the start of tunnelling, a portal has been built at Royal Oak and the remaining tunnel contracts have been awarded.

Eight TBMs will undertake a total of 10 individual drives to construct the 6.2m diameter tunnels under London. At 7.1m-high, 140m-long and weighing 1,000 tonnes, a tunnel boring machine by any measure is a giant piece of equipment.

The next two TBMs will launch from the Limmo Peninsula in Docklands for the eastern tunnels in mid-2012, two TBMs will begin constructing the 2.6km Thames Tunnel between Plumstead and North Woolwich next winter and the final two TBMs will travel from Pudding Mill Lane driving towards Stepney Green starting in 2013.

Five twin tunnels will be constructed including:

• 6.4km-long tunnels from Royal Oak to Farringdon
• 8.3 km-long tunnels from Limmo Peninsula in the Royal Docks to Farringdon
• 2.7 km-long tunnels from Pudding Mill Lane to Stepney Green
• 0.9 km-long tunnels from Limmo Peninsula in the Royal Docks to Victoria Dock Portal
• 2.6 km-long tunnels from Plumstead to North Woolwich (Thames Tunnel).

All of this adds up to 42km of new tunnels located below the busy streets of London.

In addition to Royal Oak, tunnel portals will also be constructed at Pudding Mill Lane, North Woolwich, Victoria Dock and Plumstead.

Slurry TBMs will be used to construct the Thames Tunnel due to the chalk and flint ground conditions in this part of the capital. The remainder of the tunnels, between Royal Oak, Pudding Mill Lane and Victoria Dock Portal, will be constructed using Earth Pressure Balance Machines which will pass through ground predominantly made up of London clay, sand and gravels. Herrenknecht AG in Germany was selected by Crossrail’s tunnelling contractors to build the eight TBMs.

Each TBM will be operated by ‘tunnel gangs’ working in shifts. Each gang is comprised of approximately 20 people – about 12 people on the TBM itself and eight people working between the rear of the machine and the tunnel entrance. The TBMs will run 24 hours a day, seven days a week, stopping for only scheduled maintenance.

Ahead of tunnelling commencing, a Concrete Segment Manufacturing Plant has been opened at Old Oak Common in west London, producing the first of 250,000 concrete segments that will line the Crossrail tunnels. The new plant will produce segments for the western running tunnels between Royal Oak and Farringdon. A second segment factory is being built at Chatham in Kent to supply segments for the eastern tunnels between Docklands and Farringdon.

The factory at Old Oak Common contains 216 moulds for the 75,000 concrete segments needed to line the western tunnels. Approximately 60 people are employed on-site and it will churn out more than 200 segments per day at its peak. The factory has been built specifically for the production of Crossrail tunnel segments and once tunnelling is complete, it will be removed.

During Crossrail’s construction, six million tonnes of excavated material will be removed – enough earth to fill the equivalent of Wembley Stadium to the roof. Close to 100% of the excavated material is expected to be clean, uncontaminated and reusable elsewhere.

More than 85% of all excavated material will be transported by rail or water including most of the 4.5 million tonnes that will be transported to Wallasea Island in Essex where it will be used by the RSPB to create a major new 1,500 acre nature reserve that can be enjoyed for generations to come.

This innovative project aims to combat threats from climate change and coastal flooding by recreating a wetland landscape. It will also help to compensate for the loss of similar tidal habitats elsewhere in Britain due to rising sea levels.

Wallasea Island will begin receiving its first shipments of earth from the construction of Crossrail’s western tunnels in mid-2012. The excavated material will exit the tunnels at the Royal Oak Portal and be transported by freight train to the former LaFarge cement works at Northfleet, Kent where it will be transferred to ships destined for Wallasea Island. To enable freight trains from London to Kent to operate, LaFarge has reinstated a former freight rail link into the Northfleet site from the North Kent Line.

Excavated materials from the eastern running tunnels will be loaded onto ships directly from the tunnel conveyor surfacing at Instone Wharf on the Bow Creek. Material arising from shafts and stations will be brought by road to Crossrail’s Docklands Transfer Site at the Barking Riverside jetty.

Up to five ships a day will transport excavated material down the River Thames to Southend-on-Sea. They will then travel north passing Foulness Island before turning west into the River Crouch to reach Wallasea Island. The transfer of excavated material from London and Kent has been planned with the support and assistance of the Port of London Authority and the Crouch Harbour Authority.

As well as delivering much needed additional rail capacity, Crossrail has an important role to play in supporting regeneration and the economy as well as creating a skills legacy.

More than 3,000 people currently work on the Crossrail project with thousands more to be employed at the height of construction.

The new £13 million Tunnelling and Underground Construction Academy (TUCA) at Ilford has a critical role to play in equipping people – particularly those from along the Crossrail route – with the necessary training and skills to work below ground. TUCA will offer training to up to 3,500 people in the skills needed for underground construction over the life of the project.

TUCA will not only ensure that Crossrail has the skills needed for its construction but will be retained post Crossrail as a specialist training centre for other tunnelling projects.

The volume of tunnelling and underground construction work taking place in London alone over the next decade is unprecedented. Aside from Crossrail, Thames Water will be constructing the Thames Tideway Tunnel sewerage scheme, National Grid will be constructing new electricity cable tunnels and the Government wishes to construct High Speed 2.

Whilst the UK has tunnelling expertise and knowledge there is not a purpose-built training facility in the UK to act as a focal point for the industry. TUCA aims to be a centre of excellence for soft-ground tunnelling skills. Currently, the nearest tunnelling training centre is Hagerbach in Switzerland, which specialises in hard-rock tunnelling.

Crossrail is investing up to £7.5 million in TUCA. The Department for Business Innovation and Skills has provided £5 million in funding via the Skills Funding Agency. Industry has pledged further sponsorship.

TUCA students will be made up of new entrants to the industry along with people from contractors’ existing workforces who want to up-skill or formalise their knowledge through nationally accredited technical and safety training.

The Tunnelling Academy will also act as the London centre for the National Skills Academy for Railway Engineering (NSARE).

Crossrail is committed to delivering at least 400 apprenticeships through its supply chain over the lifetime of the project. Crossrail contractors are obliged to provide jobs or apprenticeships to local people and those who have been unemployed for more than six months.

Apprenticeships are offered as contracts are awarded and contractors are encouraged to promote job opportunities within the 33 London boroughs. Apprentice numbers are expected to rise in line with the delivery phase as major tunnelling activity gets underway.

To provide local people with opportunities to work on the Crossrail project, we have formed a partnership with Jobcentre Plus. Jobcentre Plus works with a network of local job brokerage and outreach agencies to match vacancies to suitable candidates and arrange interviews for shortlisted applicants. Con – tractors are obliged to send all employment opportunities to the job brokerage service 48 hours before they advertise them elsewhere. This gives the Jobcentre Plus team an early opportunity to put forward job-ready candidates from the local area.

More than 60 major contracts have been awarded to date to Tier 1 contractors and more than 1,000 contract opportunities have been advertised throughout Crossrail’s supply chain with thousands more still to follow.

Further major contracts will be awarded during 2012 creating additional opportunities for the UK supply industry. Aside from the remaining main construction contracts for the central London stations, Crossrail will be awarding the major £400 million tunnel fit-out contract as well as the contract for the new signalling system.

About the author

Andy Mitchell has worked in a wide range of industries since graduating in Civil Engineering from Imperial College in 1981. He spent five years with Chicago Bridge and Iron working on a new liquefied petroleum gas, liquefied natural gas storage facility on Das Island, Abu Dhabi, as well as gaining design and manufacturing experience in France and South Africa. His petrochemical experience continued on refineries in South Wales before spending three years in the design of coal and nuclear power plant for the Central Electricity Generating Board and Nuclear Electric. Andy then spent five years working for Kier Construction on a range of civil projects in the UK, during which time he gained his MBA in Project Management from Henley Management College. 1995 saw Andy go to Hong Kong for six years, working on the Hong Kong Airport passenger terminal building and for the Kowloon-Canton Railway Corporation on the West Rail project. In 2001 Andy returned to the UK to work for Network Rail, leading and successfully delivering the Southern Region’s power supply upgrade project, before taking the helm of, and launching the Thameslink Programme where he stayed five years. Andy joined Crossrail in 2009 as Board Member and Programme Director responsible for all aspects of delivering the project. He is a Fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineers.