Andrew Rosindell visits Farringdon CrossRail site

This week, Andrew Rosindell was among a handful of MPs able to witness the completion of the monumental CrossRail tunnelling project at Farringdon.

Construction of the first CrossRail tunnels began just over three years ago, in May 2012, when two Tunnel Boring Machines (TBMs) known as Phyllis and Ada began their journey from Royal Oak to Farringdon. On Thursday morning, TBM Victoria pushed through the final few metres of 26 mile tunnel network. Andrew was among the small number of visitors, in addition to Prime Minister, David Cameron, and London Mayor, Boris Johnson, who were invited to witness the breakthrough. 

Visitors donned hard hats, protective spectacles and high-vis jackets, before descending 40m down to tunnel level. There they received presentations from several directors regarding the major engineering and technical challenges involved in the project, which has been in planning for over 10 years, and will cost almost £15bn overall.

‘The Big East-West Breakthrough’, which took place on Thursday morning, was the final stage of the tunnelling stage of the project, which links up Royal Oak in the West with Pudding Mill Lane and Canary Wharf in the East. The CrossRail project overall, however, is much broader. Upon completion, it will provide a link from Romford and Gidea Park to Central London stations such as Paddington and Farringdon, and even Heathrow Airport, without the need to change trains.

Existing Metro services, currently operated by Greater Anglia, will be completely replaced by CrossRail, and capacity at peak hours literally doubled, from 6 trains per hour, to 12. For London as a whole, the CrossRail project will provide a hugely significant 10% increase in rail capacity, which will be welcome news for residents of Romford and the surrounding areas, many of whom currently take packed trains into Central London in the morning. CrossRail trains will begin running from Romford into Central London in December 2018.