Farringdon: the birth of a station

Crossrail, London’s nascent rail network, officially hit the halfway mark this January: on time and on budget.

While such a claim would be a welcome distinction for any large infrastructure project — where delays and timelines so frequently slip in the face of the unexpected — Crossrail’s scope makes it doubly impressive.

The project is vast, the largest of its kind in Europe and with a huge range of challenges across its length: from excavating 42km of tunnels through London’s complex and crowded subterranean world, to the construction of entirely new stations and infrastructure in some of the capital’s most densely packed areas.

But arguably one of the most challenging and ambitious parts of the whole undertaking is Farringdon station which, when the network opens for passengers in 2018, will become one of the city’s busiest transport hubs.

Like much of the rest of Crossrail, the scale of the work at Farringdon is obscured by the ubiquitous blue hoarding that enables most Londoners to tune out the project. But The Engineer was recently granted a rare opportunity to step backstage and take a detailed look at what Farringdon’s project manager, civil engineer Nisrine Chartouny, proudly calls ‘the heart of the network’.