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Crossrail will deliver a high-capacity, high-frequency railway to 37 stations, linking Maidenhead
and Heathrow in the west with Shenfield and Abbey Wood in the east, through 21 kilometres
of twin-bore tunnels under central London. A £2 billion investment will see the construction
of eight new central London stations at Paddington, Bond Street, Tottenham Court Road, Farringdon,
Liverpool Street, Whitechapel, Canary Wharf and Custom House. These are stunning, sustainable,
world-beating designs, developed by some of the United Kingdom's best known architects
and engineering firms. All the stations have different challenges
depending on how technically challenging they are to build and also where they fall in the
programme as well. Around 200 million passengers will travel
on Crossrail each year and the new stations are being designed to cope with these huge
numbers. The first feature is how big they are. They'll
have a platform length of over 250 metres, every station will have two exits and two
entrances so size is one aspect. The other one is all about feel. We want it to feel
like a quality journey, we want it to feel like a quality station. But at the same time,
when passengers are using it, that the messages that they get about when is a train arriving,
which way to go when they get off a train - all of that, we want to make it very user
friendly. This realistic mock-up of what a typical Crossrail
underground station platform will look like shows engineers and designers how the new
platforms will work in real life, so that any modifications can be made before building
work actually starts on the platforms for real.
Really it's the volume and the size that is different to London Underground station and
perhaps the most obvious technical difference is the separation of the platform space, the
people space, from the railway space. We're trying to do it so that there's a sense of
order to the stations, and that the below ground passenger environment has a degree
of consistency as you run through the central section stations, so you know you're in a
Crossrail environment. Coming into this mock-up it gives you a good
indication of the scale of the platform tunnels and, as you can see, they're quite large.
So the ability to come in and create these spaces whilst continuing to control the movement
of the ground up above is going to be one of the biggest technical challenges on the
job. It's one thing looking at drawings and architects
designs, but this is so different when you physically start to see what it can look like.
It's a way away yet in terms of the construction, but physically being able to see something
like this, I think is just so exciting.