Hello.
My name is Diana Nahle and I'm the site engineer for the shaft.
Have you ever wondered what's behind these hoardings
of a construction site? I'm here to show you around. Please follow me.
On the other side, health and safety is our priority,
and that's why before heading out to site, we have to ensure
we've got our hard hats, our glasses, our high vis shirt
and trousers, the gloves and the boots.
We've had our start of shift briefing this morning,
so we're ready to go.
So this is our viewing platform where you can see the whole site,
which is quite busy at the moment.
The ancillary shaft is over there.
You can see these white containers that are the silos
where we store our shotcrete.
And just behind me there, there's the crossover box,
which is used for the trains to switch tracks
and then head to towards Old Oak Common Station, which is just over there.
So this is our Tally Hut where everyone has to tally in
before going inside the shaft.
Now I've got my MSA, which is the breathing equipment
in case of emergencies, and we're ready to go down the shaft.
Before we go down, we make a stop here, which is our silos.
This is where we usually store our shotcrete which is used to spray
the concrete down the shaft.
So we're ready to go down now, being lifted in the manrider.
As you can see, that the shaft is 25 metres wide.
At the moment about 30 metres deep.
We've gone through two different stages of construction,
so the first one there being the segment aligning,
which is just precast rings put together to make one, one ring -
there are 11 of them. And then just below that, we've got the spray concrete.
So this is the ancillary shaft. You can see the progress
we've made over the past couple of months.
It actually looks quite deep from the bottom.
So we started off with the segment aligning,
which was the first 11 rings of precast concrete segments.
And then the second stage of construction was a spray concrete, as you
can see, that goes all the way to the bottom.
And at the moment, we are doing some snagging works on
the profile to prepare it for the waterproofing construction stage,
which is starting next week.
And yeah, it just feels incredible to be part of this team and,
you know, progress that we've made so far and being one of
the first shafts on the HS2 to come this far.
But yeah, this is why I did engineering, seeing things come to life.
It just gives you that satisfaction, and I hope you enjoyed today's tour.
I'm going to head up, but you're free to have a look around.