Crossrail 2 October 2015 – Managing Excavated Materials
How Crossrail 2 gets rid of all the excavated materials from the tunnels is important to London, its residents and visitors.
I think it is true to say, we don’t want to see herds of trucks moving tunnel spoil to landfill.
Crossrail took most of the spoil to Wallasea Island to create a nature reserve, moving most of the spoil there by rail and water.
In this document on the TfL website entitled Building Crossrail 2 – our approach to minimising construction impacts, this is said about managing excavated materials.
From Tottenham Hale and New Southgate in the north to Wimbledon in the south, tunnels will be bored over approximately three years by large machines known as Tunnel Boring Machines (TBMs). These machines would be similar to the ones used to build the Crossrail 1 tunnels, excavating earth and building a tunnel around them as they go.
Current proposals are that two TBMs would be deployed to each of the following ‘drives’:
- New Southgate to Stamford Hill junction, where the machines would be dismantled at the proposed Stamford Hill shaft
- Tottenham Hale to Victoria and Wimbledon to Victoria, where the machines would be dismantled at the proposed Victoria Coach Station shaft
The excavated materials would be removed along the tunnels, rather than taking material out on the surface through station worksites and using vehicles to remove it. The construction of Crossrail 2 is being planned to minimise lorry movements where possible. By connecting the tunnels first we would provide an underground route to remove excavated soil from our sites. As a result a typical Crossrail 2 station would need roughly half the number of waste lorry movements compared with similar projects in the past, which would minimise the risks to public safety, congestion and pollution.
We are already planning ways of finding productive uses for excavated material. Crossrail 1 has used almost all of its excavated material in land reclamation projects across London and the South East, including creation of the bird reserve at Wallasea Island.
Obviously, it needs to be filled out a bit, but it is a good starting framework.
So it would appear that tunnelling would start from three sites.
- New Southgate
- Tottenham Hale
- Wimbledon
These three sites are all on major rail lines, with a brief look saying there is quite a bit of space at each. So at least there is space for a couple of sidings, where trains can be filled up with tunnel spoil for moving away from London.
In these posts I take a more detailed look at the three sites.
The Anonymous Widower 
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