Crossrail — London's new underground railway

Crossrail is a new railway project in the South East of England passing from East to West underneath Central London and connecting to eight existing Underground and Mainline Stations. This involves the upgrade of over 200km of surface railway along with the replacement or upgrade of 30 existing surface stations and the construction of 42km of a new 7.2m diameter tunnel with two crossovers and two bifurcations, connecting eight new underground and one new surface station in Central London. As London is ever-expanding, with the World Financial and Service Centres at the heart of its commerce, Crossrail will increase the rail capacity into the Capital by 10%, bringing an extra 1.5 million people to within 45 minutes of its city centre. Work started in 2009 with the driving of the first pile into the dock at Canary Wharf (East London), but now we are coming to the latter stages of this £14.8bn project and we have just energised the 25kV overhead line system for early Dynamic Testing. With over 100 million man-hours having been spent on the project to date, we are now on target for completion and full passenger service in time for Christmas 2019. This paper intends to give a few highlights of significant issues identified on the project to date.