Crossrail update

[ffutures]

Things are progressing slowly on the Crossrail front, but for the next few months the work is apparently going to be mostly preparatory stuff - installing walls to stop the old and new cuttings from collapsing, laying concrete, etc.

One thing I noticed from the updates they keep putting through the letterbox is that they are using a vacuum technique to excavate the slots for the "membrane walls," the reason being that they want to avoid damaging "essential services"

The whole area has been a railway shunting yard since the middle of the 19th century, so exactly what "essential services" might be underneath it is somewhat difficult to imagine. But it occurs to me that something that avoids damaging "essential services" may also score high on the "not setting off any WW2 bombs that might happen to be around" criterion. This area was VERY heavily bombed during WW2 - my relatively short street took two bombs, a large area on the other side of the railway was pretty much demolished, and the tracks and Paddington station were VERY high-priority targets.

Hopefully I'm wrong, but it wouldn't astonish me if something turned up while this is going on.


Meanwhile, I had to take the underground this evening - here are a couple of pictures I took from the platform of Royal Oak station.

Looking East towards Paddington Station from Royal Oak, I think the red tanks are cement and some sort of gunge that's used to fill the slots temporarily while they are being excavated.



Looking west towards the area opposite my house, some of the construction equipment that's currently being used to excavate etc.

Comments

[mymatedave.livejournal.com]

If there's going to be work done across the road from you, I'd highly advise getting round a certified surveyor to take photos of your house so that any repair costs caused by construction, and there will be costs I know this from personal experience, can be claimed back from whatever construction corporation is responsible for the building site.

Having before and after photos saved my family a sizeable amount of money, and we only had a block of flats being built.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

It's not just across the road - it's across the road then across four existing main railway lines (six if you count the two sidings that don't seem to be in use any more) and two underground lines. And the house is nearly 200 years old and has had several rounds of foundation repairs etc., amongst other reasons because there's an underground stream nearby.

Bottom lime is that proving that any problems have been caused by construction, short of a land slip or bomb or something, would be next to impossible.

[heliograph.livejournal.com]

Iron harvest!

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

It's certainly got a very steampunk feel to it - all those rivets etc. The structure of the station and the bridge frames the rest of it in the foreground, with the curved underside of the Westway elevated road looming over the rest of it like a flying saucer.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

The texture of the topmost diagonal in the first picture made it look like the picture was stairsteppy, and it took several seconds for me to see it otherwise.

It's like I was doing a special kind of magic trick where I was only fooling myself.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

No, I had exactly the same reaction the first time I saw it before I realised the cause.