Transcript

Interview with Andrew Wolstenholme of Crossrail

ANDREW WOLSTENHOLME:

Well, I suppose you can talk about Crossrail being the biggest construction programme in Europe. It’s 14.8 billion pounds. We’re digging 50 kilometres of tunnels under London. And if you get on a train at Maidenhead and get off at Shenfield, then that’s about 120 kilometres long. So this is as big as they get.

EVAN DAVIS:

Why does London need this?

ANDREW WOLSTENHOLME:

I mean major infrastructure projects provide a lot of different things. One is it’ll help Londoners move. It’ll provide 10 per cent extra rail transport capacity for London. It’ll provide the opportunity for up to three million square feet of development above our stations. It will bring 42 billion pounds of economic growth over its life cycle. So, it moves people; it provides economic growth; it provides jobs. And it provides development opportunity.

EVAN DAVIS:

Let’s talk a little bit about the engineering. Early days, what are some of the difficulties of building this mega project across what is one of the biggest cities in Europe?

ANDREW WOLSTENHOLME:

Well, I think you can understand the complexity of putting 50 kilometres of tunnels under London. We’re going to come up just 350 metres from where we stand now at Paddington, then at Bond Street and Tottenham Court Road. All of these stations create challenges in them – in themselves. London – if you look at a picture of it underground – is fairly full of foundations, of utilities, of sewers. You know, Bazalgette in 1860 began to build the sewers of London. So we have to understand the relationship between Crossrail and those. And, technically, I think people will be fascinated by how you build a deep station at Bond Street, how you connect the running tunnels to it, and how behind me you use tunnel boring machines to make all this possible in a safe and economic manner. You know, the depth of the station, for instance at Bond Street. If you take Nelson’s Column, then you’re two-thirds of the way up Nelson’s Column below the ground. If you look at the different station concourses, there are three full size football pitches between the east and the west concourse. At Liverpool Street, therefore, in the east you are at Liverpool Street and in the west you’re at Moorgate. And the huge scale engineering to logistically feed these projects, to understand the technology of how these structures relate to the existing infrastructure of London, are all challenges that we are well rehearsed in. UK engineering is the best in the world. And this is really what we’re very good at.

EVAN DAVIS:

At points you’re coming very close to other things, aren’t you? You’re kind of gliding past other tunnels and under building foundations, even perhaps touching them.

ANDREW WOLSTENHOLME:

Well, we never touch things. We come relatively close, but these tunnel boring machines are designed for safety. They’re designed to minimise the movements and the deflections and the disruptions of any infrastructure that comes very close. That’s why we’ve spent almost ten million pounds per each one of these machines. They’re the most sophisticated, and certainly the safest, that you can buy in the world. So the deflections at the surface are very small, and they go relatively slowly. We monitor all the services around us. And, therefore, the risk of anything happening is very low.

EVAN DAVIS:

How much planning, and what planning, has to go into something like building a Crossrail?

ANDREW WOLSTENHOLME:

Well, I mean, Crossrail was first talked about 20 years ago. But when you start the physical engineering, up at a very high level, this started three or four years ago for Crossrail. There have been about two thousand people designing Crossrail for almost two years now.

EVAN DAVIS:

What is innovative? What is some of the innovative, leading-edge things that Crossrail’s pioneering?

ANDREW WOLSTENHOLME:

Well, I think if you look at the rail sector, Crossrail has a fantastic opportunity to move the industry forwards. And what we’re trying to do is two things. One is to create the environment where people can bring their ideas - it’s called an open innovation model - and that we can share those ideas and accelerate the pace at which they’re accepted on a programme like Crossrail. The second thing we’re doing is that we’re sponsoring our own innovations. And let me give you two examples of that. Signalling - we are using a communication-based signalling system, but we’re going to design and build a transition to the new European signalling systems. We’re also looking at how, perhaps, you can recover the heat from tunnel segment rings. And if we don’t achieve that on Crossrail then we’ll make sure that the industry is four or five years closer to future projects around the world. So those are the sorts of examples of innovations, the environment to share ideas and the sponsorship of ideas on Crossrail itself.

EVAN DAVIS:

You’ve also been doing a lot of modelling, haven’t you? Design modelling underground. Quite challenging environment in itself.

ANDREW WOLSTENHOLME:

So, another innovation is using the technologies of digital modelling. Something that the car industry and the aerospace industry did perhaps 10 or 20 years ago. But if you bring together all the models, all the geometry, and you begin to understand how you can construct these models, not just to design and build but to operate over 60 years, this will be a fantastic opportunity, at a scale that no one’s seen before, to improve and to advance the technology of building information modelling.