After our visit a couple of weekends ago to the sites of the new Bond Street Crossrail station that are currently under construction this week we were able to visit part of the new Crossrail Liverpool Street Station.
Just like Bond Street, as the new station has very long platforms, it will also have two ticket halls; a western one at Moorgate (the station entrance in Moorfields) and an eastern one at Blomfield Street. At these sites, shafts that will provide ventilation and emergency access, and house mechanical and electrical equipment for the new ticket halls are currently under construction. There will also be connecting corridors at each ticket hall to enable interchange between The Underground at Moorgate and Liverpool Street.
The 250 metre long platform tunnels are currently being excavated and constructed from a temporary worksite in Finsbury Circus. Crossrail’s tunnel boring machines will travel through these tunnel later in 2014 to complete the route to Farringdon.
You can see the Finsbury Circus site in the background of the photograph below. The area behind the blue hoardings is a compensation grouting shaft site. The red coloured construction to the left was a device intended to load lorries taking away earth from the site, but was found to be too noisy in practical operation. Noise is constantly measured by microphones (see if you can spot them on the buildings) and any breach of the noise regulations is notified by text message to the contractors and the City of London automatically.
Crossrail Moorgate Shaft site
The existing ABN AMRO Bank building on the site was demolished and some of the piles that used to support it removed before work commenced on the shaft itself in 2013.
Crossrail Shaft Construction at Moorgate
86 tonne mobile crane at Moorgate
60 metre high diaphragm walls were constructed first (you can see these around the outside and are textured identically to the ground from which they were dug), the supporting structure for the mobile crane was put into the ground (it is further cross braced as it gets revealed as the excavation progresses) and then the actual excavation of the material in the shaft commenced.
Reinforced concrete supporting rings (containing 2000 tonnes of steel) are constructed as the shaft gets deeper to support the walls. Once complete the shaft will be 40 metres deep.
The mobile crane in use is brand new, weighs 86 tonnes and was delivered from Switzerland at Christmas. A very exciting Christmas present for the project the site manager told us! One for the crane-spotters!
We’ll also be posting about the Crossrail Whitechapel and Farringdon sites later on in February too.