So here we're at Whitechapel station where from 2018, 24 train per hour will pass through
this platform tunnel here, this is the westbound tunnel. Behind me you can see the bottom of
CS1 which stands for construction shaft number one. That was the first shaft done from which
all of this work has been carried out. On the surface there's an acoustic shed where
all of the back up facilities for this operation are housed. We have neighbours and residents
very close by so in order to allow 24 hour working we had to enclose it in acoustic sort
of shroud. As we walk down here you see this is the platform tunnel for the westbound trains,
like all of the platform tunnels on Crossrail there's about 250 metres long of useable platform
that pedestrians will get on and off trains. This one is a bit longer because we've excavated
a crossover tunnel which allows you to put trains between the eastbound and westbound
tunnels mainly for operational and maintenance reasons, you can change the frequency of trains
in the central section as well. The longest SCL tunnel that I'm aware of on Crossrail
is the eastbound tunnel and that's over 400 metres, that houses the sister chamber to
this one so obviously you've got one tunnel coming into this chamber and two leaving. The
other side there's a symmetrical equivalent where two tunnels enter and one leaves looking the other way.
Whitechapel station has three cross passages like this one here, that allows
passangers to travel from the westbound to the eastbound and vice versa. At the bottom
of this one you can see this is the escalator. Now Whitechapel station only has one entrance
and one ticket hall so everybody who enters the station will be coming down the escalator
here. This is quite unique in order to keep separate from the activities in the box and
the on going ticket hall construction, the contractor here bought this machine which
is an adaptation of a mining machine from the German coal industry that's been specially
developed for this operation here. It's got a shotcreting boom and a bucket so it's bespoke
for uphill SCL tunnelling in clay, it will be used for two other escalators at Liverpool
Street later this year. In the original programme we had to wait a few months until the shaft
above us is finished, therefore we decided to develop an uphill excavation machine that
would allow us to go from the bottom up and therefore we would be able to speed up the
programme. Basically the key to the machine is that we installed a rail system which you
can see on the right and on the rails the machine can drive on the tunnel ceiling uphill.
So therefore the driver is always in a safe position. The uphill excavator it's not just
a machine it saves time on the programme and it's safe to do.
Just the other side of this bulkhead door is one of the big TBM machines Elizabeth. We handed this over last week to
the eastern tunnels tunnelling contractor. It is inching its way through the station
ready to launch again in about two weeks time on its way to Liverpool Street and beyond
to Farringdon. You can Elizabeth the tunnel boring machine and it's in the process of
being transited through the Whitechapel station. it's approximately half way through its transit
to the launch chamber at the west end of Whitechapel station. It has already tunnelled from Limmo
here to Whitechapel approximately 5km of bored tunnel. We will launch from here in a few
weeks time passing through Liverpool Street and underneath the City of London en route
to Farringdon where this drive will terminate. We have about 3.5km of bored tunnel to complete
which will take us into next year. This final section of tunnelling is the final push of
the Crossrail tunnelling marathon. When these two machines arrive at Farringdon they will
meet up with the previously constructed tunnels and that will complete all bored tunnel on
the Crossrail project. There's a great deal of work going on in a very tight area everything's
getting concentrated around here, we're pouring invert concrete here and everything is very
concentrated. In 2018 there will be 24 trains per hour running between here and Paddington
through the centre of London. Whitechapel station intersects with both London Overground
and Underground so this will be a bit of a hub between those two different networks.
I think everybody the BBMV and Crossrail teams have worked very closely together to get a
lot of work done for the TBM's there is a lot of work still to do post TBM's but there
has been about 250 guys here at Whitechapel the same at Liverpool Street to create this
rather impressive worksite.