Work has now started on the first platform tunnel at Crossrail’s new station complex deep under Liverpool Street ready for London’s new ‘super tube’ to open in 2018.
It will be the eastbound platform serving 24 trains an hour to Whitechapel where the line then splits into two branches, one to Canary Wharf and Abbey Wood, the other to Stratford, Ilford and Brentwood.
Liverpool Street is one of Crossrail’s biggest interchanges with two ticket halls planned, serving Liverpool Street and Moorgate, and links to five Underground lines—the Central, Metropolitan, Circle, Hammersmith & City and Northern—as well as Stansted Express and National Rail main line to East Anglia and the East Coast.
Crossrail’s Bill Tucker said: “Liverpool Street is one of our most challenging projects with four construction sites in a tight area—but we’re working to minimise disruption.”
Work on the eastern ticket hall begins early next year beneath the National Rail main-line terminus, close to where hundreds of skeletons were unearthed from the site of the medieval St Bethlehem Hospital when excavations began last year.
The giant tunnel boring machines drilling Crossrail’s central section, which started from Canning Town in December and are now at Canary Wharf, arrive at Liverpool Street late next year.
By 2018, the direct link to Heathrow will only take 33 minutes from Liverpool Street, 36 from Whitechapel, 39 from Canary Wharf and 40 from Stratford.
[pictures: John Zammit]
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