London's Crossrail: welcome to the underworld

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To pay a visit to Phyllis, you have to enter the tunnels through the Westbourne Park site, a slim yard between the Westway and the Paddington mainline, where temporary offices are stacked like building blocks and cranes hoik huge sections of concrete tunnel lining from goods’ sidings. The two entrances are only accessible by the temporary service railway that the engineers are building as they go along. Ventilation ducts and conveyor belts protrude from each hole like drip tubes from a hospital patient. ‘The earth is a living, breathing thing,’ points out assistant project manager Greg Reichmann, as we descend in our ‘man-rider’, a cage on wheels with a few seats.

Inside, the smell is damp and clean, the aroma of London clay, combined with those reassuring industrial smells of oil, diesel and fresh sweat. It’s the noise that gets you — the worst thing I’ve ever heard. At the bottom is a scraping low note like a hellish double bass; in the middle periodically shrieking horns; at the top a cranky, scraping rattle that hits the sensitive bits in your teeth. When we reach what they call a California Crossing — the track splits in two so that two locomotives can pass one another — it all erupts. ‘It’s like screaming!’ winces one young engineer, adjusting his ear plugs. I get the sense you don’t get used to it.

At every stage, Crossrail has been a logistical nightmare. The idea of a trans-London railway was first floated in the 1960s, but it took decades of lobbying and politicking to convince the Treasury that there would be economic value in it. Eventually, it was the gumption of the former Labour Transport Secretary Lord Adonis, Boris Johnson and Ken Livingstone that saw it through, with work finally beginning on the £14.8 billion project in 2009.

Only when you take in any of the 40 sites at close quarters do you get an idea of the scale of the operation. Crossrail is essentially like a new London Underground line, only twice as big. It will span 118km of track, 21km of which will be housed in brand-new tunnels like the one I am exploring. The line starts in Maidenhead in Berkshire, taking in Slough, Heathrow airport, Paddington, the West End and the City before branching at Whitechapel, where the northern section will run to Shenfield in Essex, via Stratford and Romford, and the southern section to Abbey Wood via Docklands. There will be 37 stations, eight of which are being built from scratch. Come 2018, we will be able to zip from Heathrow to Tottenham Court Road in half an hour, Paddington to Canary Wharf in a quarter of an hour. Homes along the route, in areas such as Woolwich, Southall and Ealing Broadway, are expected to rise in price by around 25 per cent.

We will get an idea of what the trains will look like in 2014, when the tendering process enters its next phase. We already know that they will be powered by overhead cables (as opposed to the ‘third rail’ on the Tube) and be up to 250m in length (a typical Tube train is 100m). With up to 24 trains per hour and room for 1,500 people on each train, 200 million people will be able to use the service each year, increasing London’s transport capacity by ten per cent.

If the statistics don’t quite evoke the scale, Phyllis certainly does. When I visit, her rear end is somewhere underneath Speaker’s Corner while her front bit is edging slowly towards the newly built Bond Street station. (The tunnels are built on a slight ascent towards the stations and descend coming out of the stations, to help with acceleration and deceleration.) She is less of a machine than a mobile mothership, complete with kitchens, workshops and a rescue pod sufficient to keep 20 workers alive for 24 hours.

The business end of the operation is the 7m circular shield, which exerts 58,000 kilo-newtons per metre of pressure as it drills — enough force to lift 2,900 London taxis. Reichmann, a 32-year-old Australian who began his career in coal mining, says that, although mechanical drills are now used instead of pickaxes, it is more or less the same system that Isambard Kingdom Brunel used to dig the Thames Tunnel in 1825 — pushing a shield against the excavated section as they build behind it. ‘Mining engineers tend to regard Brunel as a bit of a hero,’ he says. ‘This may be a German machine, and the workers from all over, but the British pretty much wrote the book on this stuff.’

Currently in the cockpit is a pilot named Ludwig, who has set all the controls to German. I notice that the machine is 4mm off course. ‘That’s easy to correct,’ I am assured. It may weigh 1,000 tonnes, but the controls — and the safety procedures that go along with them — are so precise as to be almost dainty. Everything is planned with laser-precision. At this depth, there is not much other stuff to avoid (water and electricity pipes and cables are buried much closer to the surface), but there are other Tube lines and there is always the possibility of secret government tunnels. ‘They don’t tell us exactly where they are,’ says Reichmann. ‘They might just tell us to plan the tunnel a couple of metres left or right.’

Most of Central London is built on clay, which is impermeable, malleable and almost self-supporting, making it an ideal substance for tunnelling. Many Londoners assume that there is a lack of Underground lines South of the Thames due to some sort of North London conspiracy, but actually, the further South you go, the sandier the ground becomes, meaning it makes more sense to build overground lines. When the time comes to excavate the Woolwich section, two specialist slurry tunnelling machines, Sophia and Mary, will be used.

Phyllis also builds as she digs. As the huge factory inches forward — average speed 100m a week — it uses its massive hydraulic arms to push another section of concrete tunnel casings into place. Each 1.6m section is made up of eight concrete segments (the factory at Old Oak Common will have to make around 250,000 of them), each one lifted into place by a vast suction machine controlled by a man with a joystick (he calls it his ‘PlayStation’). It’s like using the nozzle of a vacuum cleaner to extract a slipper from under the sofa, only this vacuum can lift 3.5 tonnes.

At the back are the mechanisms for getting rid of the excavated clay — conveyer belts pass out 7,500 tonnes of it each week. Since the machine will have moved 100m forward in that time, the belt must keep getting longer and so a conveyor belt-lengthening station is built in. Ultimately, 4.5 million tonnes of clay will be taken out to Wallasea Island in Essex, where it will become the largest wetland reserve of its kind in Europe.

All of this requires constant manpower. Twenty people work on Phyllis 24 hours a day, in three eight-hour shifts. Then there are the armies of support staff. The driver of our service locomotive, Eamon McDonald, 31, from Palmers Green, is one of 400 apprentices being trained through the new Tunnelling and Underground Construction Academy (TUCA) in Ilford, having been directed there through the Jobcentre. ‘I trained as a carpenter but ended up doing a lot of shuttering, which was rubbish, not much skill to it,’ he says. ‘I want to do tunnels now, it’s such interesting work.’ For the moment he is driving Locomotive 7 (and looks mildly disgusted when I ask if he’s given it a name: ‘Never name a train,’ he says). Ultimately, he hopes to become a full tunnelling engineer. It takes around ten years to gain the expertise to pilot a machine like Phyllis.

By then, Crossrail 2 could be under way. The sequel, recently proposed by the lobbying group London First, will run from Wimbledon to Cheshunt via Chelsea and Hackney, thus bringing East London hipsters into uncomfortable reach of West London Sloanes. There are also huge extensions to Victoria station and London Bridge, not to mention the High Speed 2 rail line. And there is demand for tunnelling engineers in Qatar where the preparations for the 2022 World Cup are under way. ‘There’s always work somewhere,’ says McDonald.

I turn to Wyn Bowkett, 48, who trained as a coal miner in Wales, transferring his skills into tunnelling around the time of the 1985 miners’ strikes. His first project was the London Ring Main, the updating of our sanitation system completed in the 1990s. Like many engineers on the Crossrail project, he also helped to build the Channel Tunnel. ‘It’s a shame people never get to see this,’ he says, patting Phyllis. ‘Most people go round on the Tube and just see the shiny stations. They have no idea. Just like they imagine that bridges appear overnight. They never think how they got there.’ ES

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