Inside London's £19BN New Railway (and its Nightmare Station)

deep beneath london you'll find this 19 billion pound new railway it's 42 kilometers of new tunnels have been carved out in between the foundations services and other tube lines but sit below what is one of the world's most historic cities but when it starts to open later in 2022 there'll be one station missing bond street the delays and cost overruns impacting what will be london's new elizabeth line are well reported the project's now almost four years late and nearly three billion pounds over budget it had issues long before the pandemic but when kovic came along it didn't exactly do much to help things for more than a decade teams right across this vast rail project have battled to build new stations and tunnels beneath one of the world's biggest cities so what was it that made bond street so particularly challenging and why is this now the only station on the line that won't open with the rest of it back in 2007 the idea for a new commuter rail service across london seemed like a good one the crossrail project was set up to build the elizabeth line a budget of 14.8 billion pounds was agreed and works began in 2009. with london's population growing this railways out to better connect to the suburbs with the city center the line runs for a hundred kilometers from reading way out here in the west beneath the very heart of the city and over to abby wood and shenfield in the east it'll service more than 40 stations including 10 new ones built from scratch it might all sound like a lot of work but the project is expected to add 42 billion pounds to the uk's economy it'll also help to ease london's housing crisis by spurring the development of some 200 000 new homes along its route and creating better connections so commuters could live out of the city the new railway will even plug into hs2 that also long delayed high-speed rail link between london and the midlands without the elizabeth line the projected rise in passenger numbers onto the underground network could force station closures due to overcrowding now fast forward from 2009 to today 2022 and the railways in passenger trials and just about to open its 2018 completion date has slipped by three and a half years and the budget's grown to 19 billion pounds despite the remarkable feats of engineering involved it's not exactly a great advert for the construction industry and the poster boy of that bad ad is bond street station reports of setbacks here go back as far as 2014 when delays in tunneling which is always unpredictable began to have a knock-on effect on the rest of the schedule the plan was to first dig the train tunnels and then working from the street level downwards creates a station box which would break through to the tunnels but not long after construction began it became obvious that tunneling bond street station would be even more complicated than predicted to try and understand this in some more detail i caught up with crossrail ceo mark wilde there was a particularly large geological fault found there and that taken a lot of engineering time for the civil engineers work out the piles are particularly deep at bond street i think there are some piles at bond street that are nearly down to the chalk aquifer they are really deep so there was a geological problem at bond street that to be overcome but the fundamentals of it were bond street was the mustering point where the tunnel boring machines were largely recovered from so bond street had to really wait for the tunneling to be completed before a lot of the tunnel boring machine equipment was pulled out in and around that area conditions up at street level didn't exactly help bond street station sits in the middle of mayfair an ultra exclusive area that boasts luxury hotels shops and heavy traffic it's home to some of the most expensive real estate in the world and that leaves very little room for street level access for large stretches of the project the only access to the site was through two nine meter access holes these proved too small to deliver the heavy machinery and steel work needed below ground level instead engineering trains brought them directly to the station sharing the already busy tracks with other traffic extra work was also needed to comply with updated fire safety standards in the wake of london's grenfell tower tragedy there were concerns that fire might spread unseen behind the concrete cladding so it had to be temporarily removed to let construction teams add more fire barriers then march 2020 arrived the world health organization declared the outbreak an international public health emergency we have run the alarm bell loud and clear you must stay at home crossrail quickly imposed a safe stop temporary halt on all construction and work only resumed around three months later on most sites but it wasn't that simple at bond streets when the pandemic hit there were almost 800 people a day working down there imposing a temporary stop and then getting going again wasn't straightforward and the station's schedule had to be replant in amongst all that the main contractors costay and skanska working under a joint venture were removed from the project and crossrail took direct responsibility for finishing the station the funny way although it cost us about 13 weeks of time you know we demobilized the whole of the site about 7 000 people in 48 hours and then we rebuilt our resources back over 13 weeks with safe procedures interestingly when we re-mobilized our productivity was much higher on street different cattle officials i'm afraid when the pandemic occurred we had 800 people at bond street and as you say a very confined space so there was just no way of remobilizing bond street in 13 weeks so there's too many people inside it was too dense you know working two meters apart from each other wearing masks bond street was the site that we had to completely reschedule putting those dark social distance days behind us efforts to finish the station are paying off bond street is now estimated to be a mere three months behind schedule i guess two things you know a really good job done by the new team in the post-pandemic era they've greatly increased their productivity typically yet 70 80 productivity now at on street and to be fair to all the other stations the fact that we finished the route where we finished the railway the signaling people don't need to be in the tunnel ventilation system means that the station people can just focus on it there's a lot to be excited about when the station does open advanced acoustic dampers should make it sound calm even when packed with commuters the ticket hall has been given the mayfair treatment with brass finishings and of course there's the main benefit of having another interchange in central london bond street station will be one of the drills in the crown no doubt the initial fears about long term working from home trends don't seem to have come true in fact industries like banking and insurance are signaling a full return to the office and the wider underground's been getting busier in recent weeks when bond street station does finally open it'll be at an uncertain time for the tube network transport for london's finances are in bad shape after two years of pandemic disruption and while passenger numbers look set to rise in the long run journeys are currently 30 down on pre-covered levels impacting revenues there's no secret that crossrail has has its challenges many people will look at this project and say look we've built troop lines under london before how was the planning of this so underestimated to the extent that it caused a delay and cost overrun that it did well crossrail is a interesting project in the fact it's not really a new tube line it's big suburban trends going underneath london linking the great western and the great eastern together so it's it's more than just a tube line also if you think of the historical context london's tube lines were pretty much finished by 1905 and the vic came along in the 60s then we extended the jubilee in kind of the late 90s so this is a genuine once in a generation engineering achievement there's no doubt that we had a lot of trouble on this program 2017-2018 you know we were over budget by about 25 and we're about three years later than the baseline so there's no use hiding away from that but i think part of the reason for that was just the immense complexity and scale of this project has never actually been done before now that's not an excuse it's just a reason why it was greatly underestimated pretty much between 2016 and 2018 we kind of lost the scale of the integration in particular this project's had its challenges regular viewers of the b1m will know that it's not the first infrastructure project in the world to find itself behind schedule and over budget and it won't be the last but that'll never detract from its long-term impact stretching decades into the future enabling millions of journeys and helping to shape london in time the delays at bond street and the reasons for them will be forgotten they'll become part of the fabric of the city it'll be taken for granted that for me really underlines the power of construction yes this project was hard yes this team worked hard to turn things around but the results will echo through time and help to better connect this great city that's all from me down here on london's new elizabeth line guys don't forget if you want to get more from the definitive video channel for construction and you want to see more of me in cool places like this make sure you're subscribed to the b1b [Music] you

Channel: The B1M

Views: 1,114,836

Keywords: B1M, TheB1M, Construction, architecture, engineering, The B1M, Fred Mills, building, crossrail, Elizabeth Line, Bond Street, Bond St, TFL, Underground, London, Tube, Delays, Mark Wild, Crossrail CEO, Trains, Station, infrastructure, transportation, public transport, railway, subway, tunneling, megaproject

Id: 1S3J1d9BpUo

Length: 9min 53sec (593 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 06 2022