This is the heart of London's retail and tourist area Oxford Street where nearly 200 million
people visit every year. We are halfway between Tottenham Court Road station and Oxford Circus
station and right here directly under my feet Crossrail is building a massive new underground station.
In 2018 around 200,000 passengers will use the new Tottenham Court Road station
every day many entering the station through this new ticket hall. There will be retail
space near the entrance and six storeys of residential building above. Passengers will
be able to take escalators and lifts down to platform level but today there is only one way down.
We have dug out quarter of a million tonnes of earth and much of that has
been sent underground through our tunnels via rail and then ship to build a new nature
reserve in Essex. Work has started on turning this huge box into our new ticket hall but
lets go and see whats happening in the tunnels.
Hi Olivia how are you? Good to see you. So we are meeting you in Olivia's tunnel how did that name come about?
Yeah the miners named the tunnel after me as a bit of fun I take it as a compliment. So our tunnel boring
machines came through here in September 2013 can you tell us a bit about what's happened
in the last 9 months to where we are today? So currently in the eastbound tunnel we're
enlarging from the TBM we are making the platform tunnel excavating it at the moment and here
in the westbound tunnel we are spraying the waterproofing making it watertight ready for
the final layer of shotcrete. We'll be finishing the tunnels later this year and the next team
will move in and commence cladding, fitting in all the electrics and all the services
that will be in when you finally get to use the station. When Crossrail's opened in 2018
will you be using the system? In 2018 I'll definitely be using this station getting to
Paddington in 5 minutes, getting to Heathrow in 30 minutes for all my holidays and getting
to Canary Wharf in 12 minutes. Above us is London Underground's existing Tottenham Court
Road station and when Crossrail opens in 2018 millions of passengers will come down escalators
through this new ticket hall into our station tunnels. Crossrail is not the only major project
going on here at the moment, London Underground is also undertaking a massive project to expand
and to refurbish their existing station at Tottenham Court Road so we're off now to visit
that site to see the work going on there.
Hi Tim this is great it's starting to look like a real station. Yeah it certainly is we've got a lot of work here installing mechanical
and electrical equipment and all the architectural finishes because of course we've got to open
this part of the station in 2015 so we're doing really well. So this will connect to
the Northern line and to Crossrail? That's right we're standing here in the Northern
line concourse area just behind you is the connection to Crossrail and in the distance
behind us over here is the connection down to the Northern line. We also have tunnels
to the Central line that we have constructed to improve access to the Central line as well
and just behind us here we've got a bank of escalators which takes us up to a new ticket
hall that we've constructed. Great, can we go and have a look at that? Yeah let's go.
Wow Tim this is fantastic, this is great. We're standing here at one of the entrances
to the station this is the entrance in front of the Centre Point building so in 2015 our
customers will be using these escalators and stairs that we can see here. So this is the
new ticket hall that provides step free access down to the Central line and Northern line
platform tunnels and this space is almost 6 times the size of the existing ticket hall
at Tottenham Court Road so it's going to be really big, bright and airy experience for
our customers. So when Crossrail opens in 2018 this will be one of 40 stations linking
Heathrow and Reading in the west to Abbey Wood and Shenfield in the east but there is
still a bit of work to do so I better get back to it.