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.
Crossrail 2 Consultation – October 2015
This is the latest Crossrail 2 Consultation from the TfL web site.
I will be extracting relevant information piece-by-piece from the consultation documents.
This is a list of my extracts.
- Angel Station
- Dalston Station
- King’s Road Chelsea Station
- Managing Excavated Materials
- New Southgate Station
- Shoreditch Park Area
- Tooting Broadway Or Balham
- Tunnels, Shafts And Head-Houses
- Wimbledon Station
I shall be starting with ones that are relevant to where I live in Dalston.
These are links to various Crossrail 2 documents I’ve used as sources.
This page is Crossrail 2’s index.
Crossrail 2 October 2015 – Shoreditch Park Area
This is Crossrail 2’s map of their possible worksites in the Shoreditch Park area. It comes from this Crossrail 2 document entitled Crossrail 2 Shafts.
Crossrail 2 Shoreditch Park
Note that the Worksites are labelled A to E.
To show them in more detail, this is a Google Map of the same area.
A Google Map Of The Area
Crossrail 2 have said this about the choice of work site.
A single worksite would be required to build and equip the shaft and the junction.
We are currently considering a number of options for the shaft in the area. Our current options have been selected because they would allow us to position the possible ‘Eastern Branch’ junction under the open space of Shoreditch Park.
Bear in mind that Crossrail 2 tunnels will be twenty or so metres down, so positioning the junction, which could be noisy, as trains rattle over the points, under a park some fifty metres and more from any dwellings, could be a good idea. Crossrail 2 wouldn’t want a repeat of the Victoria Line noise problems at Walthamstow
If we assume that one work site is what they’d like to do, I don’t feel that they would use more than two. The sites are as follows.
- Sites A and B to the West are commercial storage.
- Site C is the North-West corner of the Park
- Sites D and E are in the Britannia Leisure Centre.
The sites D and E are on the Hackney branch of the line, so unless that line is built in Phase 1, I doubt that they will be used.
If they are, knocking down and rebuilding leisure centres or commercial premises is a lot less costly and inconvenient, than demolishing houses or flats.
I don’t know what Crossrail 2 will do, but I visited the Crossrail site at Stepney City Farm, which is over a massive junction on Crossrail, so is very similar to Shoreditch Park.
I found a very good relationship existing between all parties. There certainly hasn’t been any bad reports about the Stepney City Farm site on the web.
This report is from the East London Advertiser.
Crossrail 2 will cause themselves a lot of problems, if they don’t do as well as Crossrail!
I took these pictures as I walked from the Britannia Leisure Centre through Shoreditch Park to Eagle Wharf Road. At the end of Eagle Wharf Road, I crossed the Regent’s Canal and looked at the building in Eagle Wharf Road from the towpath.
I can’t see any obvious reason, why the Leisure Centre would be used for Crossrail 2, as neither of the commercial buildings in Eagle Wharf Road are of the finest quality and given Crossrail’s treatment of Mile End Park, there would appear no reason the corner of the Park can’t be used.
One of the great advantages of the Park, would be that if you need to bring in some really heavy equipment, you’d just remove the iron railings and roll it through the gap.
Under current plans, there would appear to be no reason to extract or insert a tunnel boring machine in the Shoreditch area.
But choosing the Park would allow this to be done if required.
There is also the problem of a head-house.
It might be difficult to provide one in the Park, but evacuating into a large park from a problem in the tunel might be very safe.
Head houses on the sites in Eagle Wharf Road could even be built into any new buildings on the site.
Architecture and engineering design is moving on apace and who knows what will be possible when Crossrail 2 is built?
The Anonymous Widower 