12.03.15
Tunnelling machine Victoria breaks into Liverpool Street
Tunnel machine Victoria has successfully broken into the eastern end of Liverpool Street Crossrail station this week, joining her sister machine Elizabeth, which arrived in January.
The breakthrough, on Tuesday 10 March at about 1pm, is part of Crossrail’s longest tunnel drive – 8.3km from Limmo Peninsula, near Canning Town, to Farringdon.
Liverpool Street is one of 10 new Crossrail stations being built in central and south-east London. The new station will be located between London Underground’s existing Liverpool Street and Moorgate stations, with connections to both.
Up to now, Victoria has bored 750m of tunnel before arriving at her final destination at Farringdon station this spring, when Crossrail tunnelling will finish.
Elizabeth and Victoria are the last of Crossrail’s eight tunnel machines that have carved a route out beneath the capital, and now more than 40km out of a total 42km of tunnel has now been constructed as part of Europe’s largest infrastructure project.
Joint Venture Dragados Sisk is constructing the eastern tunnels between Pudding Mill Lane and Stepney Green, Limmo Peninsula and Farringdon, and Victoria Dock Portal and Limmo.
The station tunnels at Liverpool Street have been built by a joint venture comprising Balfour Beatty, BeMo Tunnelling, Morgan Sindall and Vinci Construction.
When Elizabeth arrived at Liverpool Street in January, Crossrail CEO Andrew Wolstenholme called it a “phenomenal feat of civil engineering that London can be justifiably proud of”.
“The next challenge is to implement railway systems across the route, keeping the project on time and within budget,” he said.
Crossrail services through central London will commence in December 2018. When the TfL-run Crossrail service is fully open in 2019, it will give commuters easy access to destinations across London and the South East including Canary Wharf and Heathrow.
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