Work is now under way on Crossrail’s new east London tunnel opening at Victoria Dock in Custom House—ready to start excavations.
The Victoria Dock Portal will take Crossrail trains onto the existing surface railway next to Custom House DLR station from the tunnel soon to be excavated from Canning Town—forming an extension to the twin borings already under construction to Canary Wharf, Whitechapel and The City.
Major engineering works were carried out in December and January with 200 engineers shifting and replacing 600ft of DLR tracks to create space to build the portal. Now they are starting on the portal or ‘gateway’ itself, with 700 piles being driven into the ground to form the foundations for the 450ft-long structure, 60ft-wide, 40ft deep.
A boring machine starts tunnel excavations in the summer of 2014 between Custom House and Crossrail’s Canning Town site at Bow Creek.
The tunnel forms part of the new London ‘super tube’ line opening in 2018 with direct links from east London to the City, West End and Heathrow Airport, as well as Shenley and Abbey Wood to the east and Maidenhead to the west.
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