![]() That is not to say that, in engineering terms, there haven’t been other hitches. There have been few changes of plan during the course of construction – most notably the extraction (or rather the lack of it) of the Tunnel Boring Machines (TBMs) from Farringdon – but this is the only major deviation of note. Here, what has been quite remarkable is that the tunnelling phase has proceeded relatively smoothly. We will turn to this shortly, but first it is worth a final glance back at how the tunnelling process ended.Ĭompleted Crossover tunnels at Whitechapel It is the fact that the operational element has been embedded in Crossrail for some time which means that even as Crossrail are announcing the end of tunnelling we can already start to build up a picture of the railway those tunnels will contain. We’ve had the voices there to help us make decisions where the eventual operational benefits outweigh engineering judgement.” “There’s a real danger on big building projects like this,” warns Chris Sexton, Crossrail Technical Director, in discussing that culture “of making decisions that make sense from an engineering perspective but fail to account for how the railway will actually need to work. Culturally, however, from an early stage it also meant the change in thinking that Bhamra described. A hardened veteran of the launch of the London Overground, he is intimately familiar with the operational challenges of launching – and running – a new railway in London. Howard Smith’s appointment a year later as Operations Director was a sound one. ![]() ”Īndrew Wolstenholme, Crossrail Chief Executive That led to the appointment of Howard, who brought to Crossrail the knowledge and expertise that was missing. We lacked balance between the huge engineering and civils focus and the need to start planning at an early stage for the railway to come. ![]() ![]() “When I arrived at Crossrail, I was told the post of Operations Director did not yet exist. “But that wasn’t part of the original plan.”Īndrew Wolstenholme, Crossrail’s Chief Executive since September 2011, later confirms that this was the case. “Both Operations and Maintenance have been involved in the project almost since day one,” Explained Crossrail Systems Director Siv Bhamra to LR a little while back. ![]() Luckily, this was a lesson that Crossrail took on board at a relatively early stage. The French, thinking more realistically, saw themselves as building a railway which just happened to need a tunnel. It is said that one of the problems of Channel Tunnel construction was that the British thought they were building a tunnel that just happened to contain a railway. ![]()
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