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Latest issue / 11 April 2012 /
2012 is going to be the most exciting year yet for the £14.8 billion Crossrail project with construction moving up a few gears as we enter our tunnelling phase.
The year has started with great expectations and excitement for the project not just within Crossrail but also amongst Londoners who have responded in thousands to our Tunnel Boring Machine (TBM) naming competition to suggest names and vote for their favourite ones. The Prime Minister has personally shown interest in the progress of the project and Crossrail’s apprenticeship programme, too; visiting Crossrail sites and facilities earlier this year.
Crossrail is now becoming more and more visible across London. At Paddington Station, we recently opened a brand new taxi-rank at the Red Star Deck which was previously on Eastbourne Terrace. Work is in now starting at the Eastbourne Terrace site to construct the Crossrail Paddington Station box to receive the TBMs that will start tunnelling from Royal Oak Portal.
Once complete, Crossrail will be the largest addition to the London and South East transport network for 50 years and it will increase the railbased public transport capacity in London by 10%. Crossrail will run 118km from Maidenhead and Heathrow in the west, through new twinbore 21km tunnels under central London to Shenfield and Abbey Wood in the east. (more…)
Rail industry news / 16 May 2011 /
Crossrail today announced that six of the tunnel boring machines (TBMs) required to deliver the new rail tunnels will be manufactured by Herrenknecht AG, Germany. (more…)
Issue 4 2010 / 4 August 2010 /
Construction of the new Gotthard line with the Gotthard and Ceneri Base Tunnels is on course. In October 2010, a further milestone will be the final breakthrough of the Gotthard: the miners will excavate the last stretch of rock between the portals at Erstfeld and Bodio/Pollegio. On the Ceneri, in March 2010, driving towards the north and south began from the intermediate heading at Sigirino. Both construction projects have therefore taken a major step forward towards their respective scheduled openings in 2017 (Gotthard) and 2019 (Ceneri). (more…)
Issue 4 2010 / 4 August 2010 /
Zurich Hauptbahnhof (Zurich main station, or Zurich HB) is the central hub for rail traffic in Switzerland. Trains pull in and out of the station virtually every minute, and over 300,000 passengers depart, arrive or change trains here daily. Commuter traffic is forecast to grow in the coming years, and over half a million passengers and passers-by are expected to be using the station every day – exceeding its current capacity limits.
Together with other infrastructure expansion projects, the new 9.6km cross-city link will soon ease the bottleneck, enabling new service patterns to be implemented for suburban (S-Bahn) rail traffic from the end of 2013 and for long-distance services as of 2015. The improved services and new connections will be of particular benefit to users of Zurich’s local S-Bahn network and to rail passengers travelling on the Geneva–Berne–Zurich Airport–St. Gallen route. (more…)
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