Station Master App

Liverpool Street Crossrail Station progress

10th February 2014

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.

Fit for the future

9th February 2014

Future fit

During the strikes last week, we noticed that TfL also put up some timely posters about the Fit for Future commitments that it wanted to bring to the tube service in the future. One of these is of course the 24-hour ‘night tube’ service which they want to bring to selected lines from 2015 onward, which … of course they can’t do until they’ve made savings by cutting back on ticket offices in stations.

But when the plans were first announced a few weeks ago, one of the smartest comments we saw was simply this – “I’d rather they concentrate their efforts on getting the current service as it is now running perfectly, before they try to extend it to run 24 hours”, and a huge part of us agrees. We’ve seen many examples in the last week where things just don’t work under normal circumstances, which you’d kind of hope that they would.

Rayners Lane Train

Here are two quite major examples of things that we’ve seen recently that we think you would agree need to be fixed.

The ‘next train’ indicator (going westbound) at Ealing Common on a very frequent basis, shows the wrong destination.

It often gets information confused and so District and Piccadilly Lines are shown out of order.

Here’s a District Line train leaving the other day, and on board it was a passenger who really thought it was going up the Piccadilly Line and refused to believe us when we told them otherwise.

Another Rayners Lane Train!
(Photo courtesy of @tkell97)

The irony of this is that it’s actually possible for this to be true – i.e. what is clearly a District Line train gets routed up the wrong branch, it happened last week and it’s happened many times in the past as well.

The signaller has messed up meaning that a train is routed up the wrong branch, and the driver wasn’t paying attention and a District Line train really has gone up the Piccadilly Branch.

Here’s a shot of it from last week at North Ealing station. It caused massive delays, and crowds of people swamping the platforms back at Acton Town in the evening rush hour, as other Piccadilly services backed up behind it whilst measure were put into place to ‘retrieve’ the District train.

The passengers have to get off at North Ealing, and the train has to go all the way up to South Harrow before it can reverse. (It’s worth noting, that for the passengers it’s quicker at this point to get out at North Ealing and walk to Ealing Broadway than it is to wait for a train back down to Ealing Common, and then wait for a train to Ealing Broadway).

So … A 24 Hour Tube system? That’d be nice for sure – but what would be nicer is if all the issues in the current system could be resolved first.

This post categorised under: Future services
—

Tube Waterways

8th February 2014

It’s .. alternative map Saturday, which mean another delve into the large Station Master archives of alternative tube maps to see what we could find.

This weekend – this rather splendid map of London’s rivers – including some lost rivers, our favourite being the Westbourne which you can still see at Sloane Square station as it crosses above the station in a large pipe!

London’s Waterways

This post categorised under: Alternative Tube Maps
—

New Aldwych Tours

7th February 2014

This might help add a bit more shine to the tube in case you’re suffering from post-strike blues. On the second day of the strike, the London Transport Museum quietly announced that tickets are going on sale on Monday of next week for more tours down to the abandoned station Aldwych, and whereas before it’s been quite limited, they’re now opening it up for four days a week – all Thursdays to Sundays, throughout the month of June, so it should make it much easier to get tickets this time unlike on previous occasions when tickets have been limited.

Also, teasingly – this time it promises to “include some tunnels, and inter-connecting walkways – some of which have very rarely been seen by the public”. We’re not sure if that means we’ll get to see anything new from last time we went there, but we’ll be on the phone on Monday trying to get tickets too …

1938 stock at Aldwych

This post categorised under: Disused Stations
—

Strike Thursday

6th February 2014

9am – Based on the latest information from TfL we’ve updated our map again. There is a service running on some of the Bakerloo Line, some Metropolitan Line trains are now going to Uxbridge and the Central Line is now running as far as Marble Arch.

Tube Strike Map for Thursday

This post categorised under: Tube
—

Strike Wednesday (Afternoon Update)

5th February 2014

2pm – Based on the latest information again from TfL we’ve updated our tube strike map. They are reporting that the Victoria Line is now running all the way to Brixton, and Central Line services now going all the way to Holborn, and round the Hainault Loop.

This post categorised under: Alternative Tube Maps / Map
—

Strike Wednesday

5th February 2014

9am – Based on the latest information from TfL, we’ve updated our map

Summary : No Bakerloo Line, Central Line is running to Ealing Broadway, the Piccadilly from is Acton Town only going as far as Hatton Cross – not Heathrow, Victoria Line is now going to Stockwell and some of the frequencies have changed for the better. The Bakerloo Line might open later in the day. The Northern Line is reporting a ‘Good Service’ !

This post categorised under: Alternative Tube Maps / Map
—

Tube Strike Map

4th February 2014

[See our post “Strike Thursday” for the latest Strike Map and information!]

With it looking increasingly likely that the tube strike is not going to be called off, Station Master has taken TfL’s list of tube services that it says it is hoping to have running, and turned it from a hard-to-understand list, into an easy-to-look at map – showing lines and stations that are opening with expected train frequencies in minutes.

Tube Strike Map – Click for full size image

We’ll live update this on Wednesday and Thursday as/if and when the situation changes.

This post categorised under: Alternative Tube Maps / Map / Tube
—

Fit to Strike

4th February 2014

The tit-for-tat games appeared in last night’s Evening Standard – the same issue in which TfL had a full page open letter from Mike Brown saying that no jobs would be lost during the changes, it also featured a column from Bob Crow demanding that no jobs would be lost during the changes.

It seems we all have to suffer whilst the latest round of political games is played out.

Here’s one take on it:

Boris, Mike Brown and the heads of TfL want to move ticket office staff out onto the front line. Let’s say that 100% of stations have ticket office right now (they don’t, 12 stations out of 270 already don’t have ticket offices), they’re saying they want almost NO stations to have staffed ticket offices.

The unions (rightly, as their job) are going to fight this, and they’ll probably end up being met half way in a compromise – around half of the ticket offices will go, and half will stay open.

But what if that’s what the bosses of TfL actually want the whole time? But they know that if they propose only half to close, then the unions will argue for compromise, and (say) three quarters will remain open.

So the TfL bosses go for the whole thing – complete closure, the unions argue against it, we all have to wait whilst the strikes are played out, and eventually they agree on only half of them being closed. The unions smile because they think they’ve staved off complete closure, and the TfL bosses secretly smile because they got what they wanted all along.

It’s just that whilst this happens, several million Londoners are massively inconvenienced for 48 hours.

All these changes occur as part of a new slogan ‘Fit for the Future’, that TfL are now using, as we discovered in this awkwardly-presented Mike Brown video, in which he lists five commitments. We can think of five of our own, but watch the video first and we’ll have more on that tomorrow …

This post categorised under: Ticket Office / Tube / Video
—

Bond Street Crossrail Station progress

3rd February 2014

This weekend we were lucky enough to be able to visit both sites of the new Bond Street Crossrail station that are currently under construction.

The new station will have two ticket halls, the western is at 65 Davies Street (behind the current Underground station) and the eastern is on the corner of Hanover Square and Tenterden Street.

From the 2nd floor of Crossrail’s offices next door we were able to get a birds-eye view over the Davies Street site:

Bond Street Western Ticket Hall site.

The walls and excavation for the 25-metre deep ticket hall at Davies Street were completed by Costain Skanska Joint Venture (CSJV) last year and the site has now been handed over to Crossrail’s tunnelling contractor BFK who will construct the pedestrian access tunnels and station platforms. The site will then be handed back to CSJV who will complete the ground floor. Another developer will add further storeys to the building which will be clad in bronze.

The Bond Street platform tunnels were completed last year when tunnel boring machine “Phyliss” passed just to the south of the station box. This was followed by TBM “Ada” whose route went directly through the site of the (at the time unexcavated) station. BFK now have to mine from the station box to reach the southern platform tunnels.

This part of the station has been built directly over the Jubilee line and many controls were in place between CSJV, Crossrail and TfL to make sure that no damage could accidentally occur. The site will also be connected by a new pedestrian tunnel to the new Bond Street Underground station ticket hall and entrance on Marylebone Lane over the road north of Oxford Street, so you will be able to interchange with the Jubilee and Central lines here.

The two platform tunnels connect the Davies Street site to the Hanover Square site a short distance away. The platforms are 250 metres in length (the length of two and a half international football pitches) and each Crossrail train will have a capacity of 1,500 passengers. In fact, passenger flows in the station have been modelled in such a way that it can be evacuated in 7 minutes should two of these full trains completely empty one immediately after the other.

After viewing the Davies Street site, our group took a short walk to Bond Street itself, where behind an anonymous gate and building façade lies the Hanover Square site – we were able to get out onto a small roof there and look down onto the site:

Bond Street Crossrail Eastern Ticket Hall site.

Unlike at the Davies Street site which will be linked to Bond Street Underground station, despite its proximity to Oxford Circus Underground station, there will not be any link here. This is deliberate as Oxford Circus station is one of the busiest. It would also make the site into one huge station complex and make it unmanageable as far as evacuations are concerned.

At the Hanover Square site we were also able to see one of the “grout shafts”:

Bond Street Crossrail Grout Shaft

There are five of these shafts dotted around the sites with bores spreading radially out into the surrounding area. Should movement of buildings be detected then grout, (concrete without the aggregate), can be pumped into the ground to stabilise it. Movement is checked for automatically every seven minutes by remote control. Crossrail have seen movement of only 23mm which is well inside their allowed tolerances.

Work is progressing well at Bond Street and Crossrail say “We’re half way there”. Services in the central tunnel section are not due to open until December 2018 (pretty much 5 whole years away) and there will be a year of testing once all the infrastructure is complete in 2017.

The cost of the whole project? £14.8 billion, of which The Exchequer, TfL and Private companies are contributing one third each.

We’ll also be visiting the Crossrail Liverpool Street and Farringdon sites later on in February too.

This post categorised under: Crossrail / Engineering / Future services / Infrastructure
—

Recent Posts

Archives