The engineering challenges of fitting out Crossrail's stations

The Engineer has followed Crossrail, the mammoth engineering project to connect London’s outer suburbs to the east and west of the city, running through Essex and Berkshire, by driving a new tunnel under the city to connect the mainline stations at Liverpool Street and Paddington, from the moments the enormous tunnel boring machines began chewing at the Earth, to where the eastern and western tunnels met. We have also looked forward to it successor project, Crossrail 2, which will travel from the north of the city to the south. The first project is now nearing completion, with its final stages – installing the linings, furniture and other fixings that will make up the stations themselves – well under way.

These are large engineering projects in their own right by any standards, although dwarfed by the magnitude of the entire project. Underground stations are complicated places, the equal of any major building, but with the added complication of being tunnelled out of the ground and having highly restricted access. Among the complicating factors is the geometry: instead of the regular orthogonal planes of normal buildings, these are structures made up from cylinders of different diameters which frequently join at odd angles, some of which will be occupied by many thousands of people throughout the day, others only accessible to the staff who will operate the station at normal times, and then areas only open to the dedicated maintenance staff who will take over the spaces for a few hours each night.