It's that week in February when snow hit Britain.
It's the last day of February.
It was minus five this morning. My hands are freezing.
But that's okay.
To warm us up to make an exciting adventure today
we've come to Canary Wharf where the Crossrail
Elizabeth Line station is complete.
(upbeat music)
Are all escalators on Crossrail yellow?
Are they all this yellow colour?
This is unique to Canary Wharf.
(upbeat music)
So let's take you for a quick tour round.
We're at Canary Wharf Crossrail eastern end,
We've come in the eastern end.
We've come down to level minus one,
which is the ticket hall.
Some might call it a mezzanine level.
Let's go with mezzanine.
And then minus two is the track level.
Two lifts here, as well as the escalators.
And we're gonna go for a wander, see what we can find.
Ticket barriers.
One of the things that TFL haven't revealed to us yet,
and it's the one pressing question,
don't ask them to comment,
is "what will the prices be on Crossrail Elizabeth Line?"
We don't know.
TFL will announce that later in the year, but look,
here's the gate line.
So I've employed Andrew as my camera, man. Thanks Andrew.
So can I be the first to tap in with an Oyster card
here at Canary Wharf?
Here we go, here we go, here we go.
Beep. (sighs)
That's good. (upbeat music)
So we're on the minus one mezzanine level.
Down here, we can't go down these ones,
I think we can go to the ones down there,
you can see the platform is down there.
I've been told that there's four sets, two escalators each,
eight escalators in total to take you
from the minus one mezzanine ticket level
down to the platform level.
Four sets, eight escalators.
Ooh, I can see some people going now.
They haven't installed the seats yet,
so I'm having to sit on the escalator.
I wonder if there will be any seats.
I'm by a door.
One thing to know about platform level, by the way,
is that, on the tube, like on the Jubilee Line,
and on the new Northern Line extension,
they're known as PEDs, platform edge doors.
Here, on Crossrail Elizabeth Line,
they're known as platform screen doors,
they go all the way to the top.
But if you peer in close, you can see, on the other side,
there's like a gap about that wide,
which presumably is to allow maintenance people
to walk along, can be used for an emergency evacuation.
So into the tunnel they've built that width.
(upbeat music)
In case you were wondering,
the diameter of an actual Crossrail tunnel is 7.2 metres.
This isn't real, is it? This is a model, isn't it?
Yeah. (Geoff laughs)
Because one thing you might have noticed,
conspicuous by its absence, are the lack
of any purple roundels down here.
I'm informed that where Andrew's standing right now,
he's about to move,
but do you know how on Canary Wharf Jubilee Line station,
they have those enormous London Underground
blue and red roundels that are also seats and you can sit?
Well, I think just here, just here,
what he's saying is that there'll be a similar thing.
There'll be like a seat and an enormous purple roundel
saying "Crossrail Elizabeth Line,"
but they haven't been put in yet, yet.
So the western entrance, not looking quite as finished
as here, the eastern entrance, is off down there.
We've said it before, we'll say again,
the platforms are over 200 metres, are really, really long.
But you can't quite picture it until you're here,
seeing just how long it is.
Yeah. Big trains.
(gentle upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
It's extremely spacious, loads of space.
Incredibly excited.
Not only is it the year 2018, it's the year of engineering,
2018 is also the year that the Canary Wharf Station,
or the central operating system, will be opening.
So December 2018.
We're one team. We all work together.
And I think only works when there's kind of a diverse team
and an inclusive team as well.
And thankfully, that's what we have on this project.
And it's one of the key things
that made the project so successful.
So very proud to be working on the Crossrail project
and very proud that it's the year of engineering,
which is something we all need to kind of celebrate,
spread the word.
Canary Wharf is one of my most favourite stations.
I'm obviously partially biassed because I've done
a lot of work on this, but if you look,
this station is supposed to reflect
kind of the maritime theme.
So the station as a whole is supposed to look
like a big docked boat, and from an angle,
or from a cross section of it, that's exactly how it looks.
So it's built in the dock. We're 28 metres below water.
It's got some Canary yellow in it, aesthetics,
that's where, you know, the escalators and lifts are.
And also every single station reflects a little bit
of uniqueness to the environment that it is in.
So for example, here we have the brushed silver cladding
round the columns and the pale terracotta tiles.
That's to reflect the kind of Canary Wharf Estate feel.
But there's also some similarities with each station, too,
so you know you're on the Elizabeth line
and that's the sleek uncluttered look,
which hopefully you can see from today.
That's what the station's reflecting.
I've kind of sprung this on Camilla.
I'm just gonna grab my bag
and Camilla doesn't really know I'm gonna do this.
I just wanted to know if you could just look into the lens.
The ceiling up there, what's that in aid of?
Because it looks like a draining rack
that you could hang the spoons from when you're washing up.
Well it might look like that, but please don't do that.
So what it is is it's kind of like the bar effect
that you have in some local bars or bars these days,
and the reason it's designed like that and the panels,
if you look kind of to the side, are modular panels,
so it's very easy to maintain and replace things,
very accessible, very quick, easy,
and also helps to give it the sleek look.
Is this just here at Canary Wharf
or are these at other stations, too, do you know?
This is one of the uniqueness to Canary Wharf Station.
Each station has its own unique identity,
as you were saying, so that's kind of cool.
But obviously, to you, Canary Wharf is the best?
I think the largest and the most progressed
and definitely the best, so yes.
This is Camilla.
Thank you so much for pandering to my ridiculous
putting-the-camera-on-the-floor shot.
That was great of you.
I've heard of lots of interesting requests,
and this is certainly high on the list for today,
but no problem.
(upbeat music)
We're on our way out.
They're calling these sort of thank you open day events.
If you want to come to these for other stations,
Tottenham Court Road, Bond Street and all that,
sign up on the Crossrail, there's a link in the description,
sign up on their website and you'll get an email
inviting you to a free ticketed event.
You can go and see all the other stations.
Later on in the year, though,
Crossrail basically hand over the stations to TFL
and there's rumours that what TFL will do
is that they'll have sort of open days
where they want to test out some of the escalators
and the lifts, and they'll sort of let some people in
and unleash them into the station and they get to test out
pressing buttons, testing, like, help points and everything,
and making sure that everything works.
But that's a TFL thing, not a Crossrail thing.
Sign up to the Crossrail website to come
to more days like this.
(upbeat music)