The Crossrail Cambridge Heath Site At Whitechapel
As the pictures of the delivery showed, the Whitechapel station site is extremely crowded. Luckily, the major occupier of the area, is a large Sainsburys supermarket, which seems to have been rebuilt, as I remember using it around the turn of the millennium and it was all massive surface car parks, which have now seemed to have gone. This Google Earth image shows the area from the supermarket to the Whitechapel Road.
Whitechapel Station, Crossrail And Sainsburys
The Sainsburys is large and it has a multi-story car park, which stretches across the picture.
Note the big hole to the South of the supermarket, which is thirty-two metres deep and is Crossrail’s Cambridge Heath shaft to provide emergency access and ventilation to the Crossrail tunnels. Read more about the shaft and the other works at Whitechapel station in this page on Crossrail’s web site. This is all you can see from outside the site.
The Crossrail Cambridge Heath Site At Whitechapel
I was standing in Cambridge Heath Road, which is the road on the right of the image, which goes past the site and Sainsburys.
All this site used to be the Mann, Crossman and Paulin brewery,of which the only remains are the ornamental gates and the Blind Beggar public house. The latter is marked on the map and is notorious for its association with gang violence of the 1960s.
I wonder what the customers of those days, would make of the area now!
Structures At Whitechapel Station
I believe that Whitechapel station, will be Crossrail’s Jewel In The East and over the Easter weekend the East London Line was closed to allow Crossrail work. These pictures show the station after the weekend.
It does seem that more big structures are going up.
This Google Earth image shows the station.
Whitechapel Station
The image was taken some time ago, but it does show the layout of the station.
Note the orange line determining how the East London Line passes through and how the Metropolitan and District Lines go either side of the works. When the station is completed, there will be one large platform between these lines, from which escalators will descend to the Crossrail platforms about thirty metres beneath.
Coal Mining in Whitechapel
I’ve just received Crossrail’s Autumn 2014 newsletter and there’s a section about using coal mining techniques to connect the Crossrail platforms at Whitechapel to the rest of the station and the surface. They say this.
An uphill excavator is being used for the first time in the UK on the Crossrail project. The machine is being used at Whitechapel, before installing the escalators that will take passengers from the platforms (over 30 metres below ground) to and from street level.
Due to difficulties in accessing the station box to dig downwards, Crossrail’s Whitechapel contractor BBMV decided that excavating the escalator barrel upwards, starting from the platform base, was the best solution.
The uphill excavator, traditionally used in coal mines, is being used in an innovative way on the Crossrail project. Built to do two jobs in one, it works its way up by excavating the earth using a digger fixed to the front. With a spray nozzle attached to the top of the machine it also installs the tunnel lining as it goes.
I suspect this won’t be the last place that the technique is used under London. I think it could find applications in connecting stations to the surface in a reversing loop with stations, or perhaps adding step-free access to a deep Underground station.
Whatever happens, it does seem that engineers are throwing conventional thinking out of the window.
Tunnelling certainly seems to be fun!
Squeezing A Bridge Between Working Railways
Crossrail has shown some impressive pieces of engineering to the media. But I’ve seen little about the work that is going on at Whitechapel station where Crossrail goes underneath the Overground, which contrary to what you might think, goes underneath the Underground. These pictures show how one of London’s most delapidated stations is being transformed.
I’m not sure, if the impressive steel bridge is for the Underground lines or passengers. But inserting it isn’t camel-going-through-the-eye-of-a-needle stuff, but something a lot more challenging. Especially, if you’re doing it in the space between two busy rail lines. Luckily for Crossrail, when the East London Line was rebuilt a few years ago, the decision was made not to convert it to overhead electrification.
Look at this section on the Crossrail web site, which shows some images, which help you to make sense of what I photographed. Helpfully, the architect has drawn the trains in the right colours.
Is Whitechapel Station Going To Be A Jewel In The East?
When I wrote about Crossrail as a tourist attraction, I said nothing about the station at Whitechapel.
I probably didn’t as although I use the station regularly, you don’t see much as you pass through except for hoardings with lots of graphics, pictures and information. When I went through last time, I took these pictures.
It shows the construction going on over the two north-south Overground platforms. Crossrail will run east-west about forty metres down. Note how the Underground is on top of the Overground.
I was told by a man in an orange suit, that there will be a bridge over the Overground platforms connecting it all together. Escalators to Crossrail will be going down from between the two Underground platforms, where the blue crane is now situated. The space between the Underground platforms will then be filled in to create a wide island platform with the two lines on either side. It will be an easy step-free interchange from Crossrail to the Underground.
There are some detailed architect’s impressions of the new station here. The page also says this.
The new Whitechapel Crossrail station will use the existing Whitechapel Road entrance to the Whitechapel London Underground and London Overground station.
The Crossrail platforms will be in deep tunnels to the north of the existing station but they will all share a concourse, ticket hall, gateline and station operations room, leading to a fully integrated station that provides an easy step-free interchange between the Crossrail, Hammersmith and City, District and Overground lines.
Transport for London’s, Transport Infrastructure Plan for 2050, states that at some point twenty-four trains per hour will run through this section of the Overground in both directions.
This matches the Crossrail and Thameslink frequencies, so once all these lines are complete, London will have gained a high-frequency H-shaped railway, where journeys like Luton, Brighton or Peterborough to Crystal Palace or Walthamstow might be accomplished using two easy step-free changes. In fact, the biggest problem after 2019 about travel in London, will be choosing which of two or three equally fast and convenient routes is best for you.
Travel is going to be fun!
I suspect Whitechapel might be my entry into Crossrail and Thameslink. I’ll just walk to Dalston Junction, take a four stop journey to Whitechapel and then fan out to the myriad destinations, that can be reached directly from there.
The Anonymous Widower 