Urban Heart Surgery The Fifteen Billion Pound Railway

Underneath the streets of London...

..an army of more than 10,000 engineers

is building a brand-new subterranean railway.

OK!

Crossrail.

We've done the maths, we've checked the maths

and we've checked them a third time.

Costing almost £15 billion, it's one of the most ambitious

rail projects in Britain since the time of Brunel.

I've been doing civil engineering for 35 or so years.

Even I can't appreciate the scale until I come down here.

Head him up!

It was a lot easier when I was five years younger

and two stone lighter!

This is a crucial stage of the project

for workers digging 42 kilometres of tunnels...

We only get one chance to build this tunnel so we have to get it right.

When you do these things, you're building a part of history,

it's going to be here for a couple of hundred years.

..and constructing ten vast new stations.

I've never build a train station before,

never mind one in a dock, underwater.

For almost two years, cameras have been following crews,

working cheek-by-jowl with some of London's

most distinguished residents.

That's ready to start pumping!

Facing a constant battle to keep London moving.

This area is where the gridlock is.

Haven't been able to go up and down these streets for four years.

Is Crossrail essential?

Be wonderful...

when it's done.

Constructing Crossrail is like undertaking open-heart surgery

on a patient whilst that patient is awake.

This is the exclusive inside story of the epic endeavour

to build London's new Underground.

London. Home to more than eight million people.

The key to keeping everyone moving - the Tube.

A vast network of 270 stations and 250 miles of track.

The London Underground handles more than a billion journeys a year.

All you've got to do is go on the underground system

in the morning and you can see it's very crowded.

The forecast for London is one of continued growth,

an extra million people in the next 10 or 15 years.

This 150-year-old network struggles to cope with peak demand.

The last new Tube, the Jubilee Line, was opened 35 years ago.

So, today, engineers are building a brand-new underground railway line

to help take the strain.

Passing right across London, it's called Crossrail.

It will run overground, from Reading and Heathrow in the west...

..straight underneath Central London.

It will connect key mainline train stations

with the historic Square Mile.

And the new business district.

Before terminating at Shenfield and Abbey Wood in the east.

120 kilometres of railway will link to the rest

of the Tube and open in 2018.

Heathrow, Europe's busiest airport,

will be just 28 minutes from London's West End,

a journey that currently takes almost an hour on the Tube.

Another eight minutes will whisk you to the booming East End.

An idea born in 1974, it's taken 40 years to get to this point.

And the project isn't without controversy.

It is a big job.

Probably the biggest single rail project

that the UK has ever seen.

Pretty much everything we do has an impact on somebody.

The budget for Crossrail is 14.8 billion.

This is taxpayers' money, it's important to remember that.

The other thing I've got to sign here is a £21 million

payment authorisation to one of our tunnelling contractors.

And this one's OK.

Building Crossrail in the middle of nowhere would be a big enough

technical challenge,

but to do that right in the centre of London, with all of

the neighbours above and around us, makes it more complex still.

Oxford Street - the shopping Mecca that runs through the heart

of London, between Marble Arch and Tottenham Court Road.

It's the busiest shopping street in Europe.

200 million people visit the high-end stores here each year.

Engineers must dig the tunnels for Crossrail

right underneath this area.

The new train line will soon make it easier for people to travel here.

But building the tunnels below ground without disrupting

the stores and shoppers above is no simple task...

..even for tunnel construction manager Steve Parker...

Hey, Mario!

..who has more than 25 years' tunnelling experience.

Oh, well, another glorious day at work.

A lot of people will say that tunnelling is boring.

If you look up in the Yellow Pages "boring",

it says, "See civil engineers."

I am a civil engineer.

Steve is part of a 500-strong team.

And this is the great picture at the Royal Oak Portal

and there's our tunnelling team.

A few Hollywood players in there, yes.

-Willie, where are you on this?

-There you are.

Ah, he's right in the middle!

That's Willie Archibald, our tunnel surveyor,

and he's got a certain height, and we use that as a unit of measure.

One Willie Archibald is a standard tunnelling unit of measure.

We've got the woolly hat here on the "Where's Wally?" thing,

and we move it around from time to time.

Steve, Willie and the team oversee the running of two giant

tunnel-boring machines - "TBMs".

In all, there are eight of these clay-eating monsters.

Each one is a 150 metres long

and weighs 1,000 tonnes.

These digging demons can burrow up to 72 metres a day.

In the future I want to be taking my family in this tunnel and say,

"Look, I worked on this."

I think many tunnellers like to think of themselves as kind of the unsung heroes.

Because it's all underground.

Steve's crew is about to face its toughest test yet.

They must weave one of the tunnelling machines through

the tightest point of the entire route,

known as "the Eye of the Needle".

At the east end of Oxford Street

lies London Underground's Tottenham Court Road station.

It's where the Tube's Northern Line and Central Line intersect.

Crossrail needs to link into this super-hub.

But digging tunnels here is not easy.

Pipes, cables and sewers crowd the ground.

The Tube's busy Northern Line platforms...

..and two escalators

make the earth extremely crowded.

The only option for Steve's team is to drive their tunnelling machine

through the tightest of gaps.

85 centimetres above a live, running Tube line

and 35 centimetres below the escalators.

It's the closest any Crossrail tunnel will come to the critical

infrastructure that keeps London ticking.

At the controls for the tightest drive of them all

is shift engineer Ed Batty.

We've been in tricky spots before but nothing where we've had

something below us

and above us in such a close proximity

so, yeah, it's a first for me.

My first job on a TBM, one year and one month I've been down here.

The first six months was a learning curve

and now I know what the crack is, basically.

ALARM-LIKE SOUND

What's going on now?

That's the TBM belt just about to start

and that's the belt that goes all the way out.

Four kilometres of conveyor belt transport the excavated

London clay out to the surface.

By the end of the project,

the tunnelling machines will have mined over six million tonnes

of earth - enough to fill Wembley Stadium three times.

Hey, guys. Lovely morning.

Steve and the team are meeting with London Underground.

We need to make sure the perimeters are absolutely clear so that we avoid

some sort of unnecessary response.

The tunnellers can't interrupt Tube services during the 48 hours

it will take their machine to pass through the Eye of the Needle.

The tunnel boring machine is passing directly over a platform tunnel.

So our customers will be able see the impact of the tunnel

boring machine passing by.

For example, you could have tiles falling off.

If we had customers on the platform who started seeing

a lot of fluid come in, they might cause a panic.

If the worst comes to the worst, we might have to evacuate the station.

The only thing we need to discuss is what surveillance regime

we're going to have in place.

The team agree to keep a close eye

on the platform as the tunnellers pass overhead.

I suppose the real excitement,

if you like, or the adrenaline will start if there is an incident.

TANNOY: Customers for all stations to Morden

should take the next available train and change at Kennington.

Tottenham Court Road station was built in 1900,

for the Central London Railway, now the Central Line.

The first line to run all day on Sundays

and nicknamed the "Twopenny Tube",

it was affordable and proved hugely popular.

The new link made the shops on Oxford Street easier to reach,

boosting their profits.

The new stations here will deliver another 120,000 shoppers a day

to the streets.

Crossrail engineers have 40 sprawling worksites

spread out across London.

Some are little more than shafts allowing access to the new

train tunnels growing underground.

Others are giant holes puncturing the landscape,

forming the outlines of ten new stations.

The sites in Central London are hemmed in between office blocks,

busy shops and roads that never stop.

This makes construction work extra difficult.

One of the pinch points

is two stops east of Tottenham Court Road,

the site for a new Crossrail station serving Liverpool Street.

In four years' time, this will be a spacious new ticket hall.

But right now there's almost no room for manoeuvre.

We'll get cracking then, yeah? Reeeet!

An elite squad of crane riggers is assembling to clear some space.

Right, this is me team I'll be working with,

this is Gurg from down here, so he knows the area.

And this is the Scouser, Lee. You've probably seen him on Crimewatch.

Cheers, Steve.

I'll never be welcome in Liverpool again, will I?

Well, I love me van!

Laptop, kitchen sink, it's all in here somewhere.

I try and keep it really tidy,

everybody takes the mick cos it's such a tidy van.

He polishes that every day.

When he gets home, he gives himself another hour on the time sheet

and gives his van a good polish.

Seven years in the army, that's what it is, you're either tidy or

you're in a lot of trouble, like.

The huge 280-tonne crawler crane has been hauling heavy equipment

around the site.

Steve leads the team tasked with lifting it from the cramped space

so building work can begin.

The lifting of the crane out of the hole,

it's not something you do every day.

I've been doing it 15 years now, I suppose it's never easy, like.

The crane is so huge, and the site so small...

Put the rest of the barriers in.

..that first they need to close off a side street

to lay its 60-metre-long boom arm down.

Keep moving her down, mate, keep moving her down.

Nice and steady. And hold it there, stop.

Just watch yourself, cos that's going to slam that way.

Hold it there, Norbert.

Steve now needs to bring in a big mobile crane to dismantle

the rest of the crawler.

The obvious place to position this

is the empty narrow strip on site,

from where it can easily lift out the crawler crane.

But the world's oldest underground railway,

the Metropolitan Line, runs less than two metres below the surface.

Putting the crane here could damage the Victorian tunnels.

So the team has no option but to position their crane on Moorgate.

Closing off one of London's major traffic arteries.

Moorgate is an essential thoroughfare into the heart

of the historic business district.

Over 400,000 people work in the City during the week

but at the weekend it's relatively quiet.

We're going to be slinging you in through the head there.

Once they close Moorgate tonight, Steve's team have just

a single weekend to get the crawler crane off site.

This part of London has always been busy.

When Victorian engineers built the Metropolitan Line

in the 1860s, they closed streets for years.

Cutting huge trenches into the ground to form Tube tunnels

caused major disruption.

Cor!

Steve can't afford to cause gridlock here today.

He needs everything to run like clockwork.

Yeah, it was a lot easier when I was about five years younger

and two stone lighter!

In the heart of the West End, Crossrail's new station

at Tottenham Court Road will be a gateway to the shops

of Oxford Street.

As well as the vibrant area of Soho.

Soho is London's entertainment hub, home to hundreds of bars,

restaurants and the West End's famous theatres.

Here we are in the middle of Soho Square.

Crossrail is building a new station directly underneath our feet here.

Our tunnel boring machine is directly under this building

opposite us there.

Advancing on average 22 metres a day,

Crossrail's vast tunnel boring machine is

closing in on the Eye of the Needle.

We've got to pass under a couple of buildings before

it gets to the Eye of the Needle, but before we get there

obviously we've got to protect the buildings.

We don't want to put the table-tennis table out of level.

It's all part of keeping London moving.

Digging directly under a city is a delicate operation.

The loose ground around freshly dug tunnels could settle unevenly,

potentially causing buildings to tilt.

So Crossrail's engineers use a network of lasers

and targets to spot any movement of buildings.

If you look closely at the buildings,

you can see lines of these prisms that are all across the facades.

On the far corner there, on the brackets away from the building,

you can see an automatic station up on the end there.

It'll know where these prisms are supposed to be,

it'll turn the instrument to see where it last read the prism from,

and then it'll take the shot that'll give it the exact location of the prism.

You'll see it rotating round now, working its way around,

and then sending all that data back to the control room

so we know where all these prisms are in real time.

Data from thousands of targets

installed across Central London flows back to Tunnel Control.

Simon Leavy analyses any slight change in ground level

picked up by the instruments.

If the ground moves either up or down, we can tell from these graphs.

The nodes on the points are blue

so that means they're not in any trigger area

but if they go to a green, it's a green alert, amber and red.

Robot trackers keep check on some of the most historic buildings

in London, 24 hours a day.

Amongst them is one of the oldest structures in Soho Square.

The Grade I listed charity and chapel House of St Barnabas.

This is just so 1750s.

This building was the anchor building for the development

of the square here in Soho.

If we look up, this is the plasterwork installed in 1754.

It's a classic piece of rococo work.

The main hall and the Silk Room next door together constitute

the last complete set of rococo plasterwork in London.

And so the house is monitored in a variety of ways.

There's a theodolite looking at these two faces

and there's another theodolite at the back.

I'm standing on top of monitoring devices,

which are built into the floor, and there are monitoring devices

above my head, again built into the floor.

This broad staircase was designed to look completely floating free.

Crossrail have built a steel framework,

which is underneath the staircase.

It's not supporting the staircase, it's a safety net.

Were the staircase to fall apart, the steel frame would catch it

and we would be able to rebuild it using the existing materials.

The House of St Barnabas is bristling with gadgets.

But, despite supporting its stairway and protecting its pillars,

there's a problem.

As engineers dig passages beneath Soho Square

to link up Tottenham Court Road's two new platforms...

..the excavations are disturbing the ground.

In Soho Square now we have some amber triggers

on the levelling points.

It's not to do with the TBM, it's the new ticket hall,

so they're actually excavating fairly deep in that area.

Sensors on the House of St Barnabas have triggered alerts.

Reverend Scott fears cracks in his plasterwork are getting worse.

The corner behind me has been gently moving towards the square.

And we are watching the cracks that are forming in the plasterwork.

Now, we don't want to be panicky about this,

but you have to keep an eye on what's going on.

The main thing is to try to ensure that it all stays up there.

The Reverend isn't the only Soho resident worried about the impact

of Crossrail's construction work here.

The Star Cafe was started in 1933 by my father.

I personally have only been here 52 years,

so, yeah, got a bit more to go yet.

Since work began, Mario's road has been closed to traffic

and the cafe is now within touching distance of the building site.

Obviously it affects the amount of people that can get down to here.

So a big bulk of our clients has gone.

I say our trade is down, yeah, 35% without any hesitation.

Is Crossrail essential?

Be wonderful...

when it's done.

Two stops back east, at Liverpool Street...

..the fight for space on the cramped site has forced the team

to close off a side street to break up a huge crane.

What we're going to do now, we're going to split

the top two pins to the boom now and lay it down on the floor.

And we'll, er, knock it to bits.

HE SIGHS

To be in my type of position?

A good back and knees.

And good with an 'ammer normally helps as well!

That's it...

Yeah, it's knackered, I'll get me paint.

Obviously, when you take a crane to bits, you've got to examine it

for any damage, any defects and that, so it's safe for the next job.

I'll mark it down, obviously someone will get a bill somewhere for it,

cos they're not cheap.

I'll do me tag.

It's damaged but it's perfectly safe to work still.

Right, we'll go for the main rope now, Norbert.

-Norbert's me crane driver.

-Where's he?

He's...in the crane.

And he loves his crane, like,

so he's sat in there with his air conditioning and his newspaper

and his dirty books, whatever else crane drivers read all day.

HE LAUGHS

Right, we'll get these pins out.

These four here.

Are they the damaged places?

Yeah, they're damaged, they'll have to be replaced.

It's the brightest colour we could get, bright pink.

Look at that, bobby-dazzler.

Innit?

They call him King Rigger. He's not bad to work with.

He likes the whip, getting yous to do things now and again.

Me Scouser's gone missing.

Hey, Steve!

Oh, he's there, it's all right, we've found him. He's not been arrested.

Right!

Once we're happy and the lights go red, we'll close the north side off, both lanes.

With the boom arm down, Steve's ready to get a mobile crane

into place on the road to lift out the rest of the crawler.

It's time to shut down Moorgate.

OK, mate, as soon as it's red and it's safe to do so, go for it.

That taxi's your last one, mate - as soon as that taxi's out.

Moorgate is now closed.

The team only has the weekend

to break down and remove the crawler crane

before the road must reopen for the Monday-morning rush hour.

But there's a hitch with the 350-tonne mobile crane

they're calling in to lift out the crawler.

I don't know if you've heard about the crane.

I haven't. Well, I've just had a heads-up.

The 350-tonne crane has got damaged on another site -

-it won't be coming here.

-OK.

There are only two of those 350-tonne cranes in the UK at the moment.

One's committed on another job and couldn't be released

and the other one's been damaged, so here we are trying to re-plan.

Back west, next to the new Tottenham Court Road station site...

..tunnelling work beneath Soho Square

is causing the ground to settle.

The Grade I listed House of St Barnabas has a slight tilt,

threatening its rare rococo decor.

Engineers must stop the earth from sinking before it gets any worse.

Before works began, they created a vast subterranean protection system.

They dug 22 unique shafts around central London

to protect historic buildings.

Four of these shafts are in Soho Square.

A spider's web of thin tube stretches out from each shaft.

Each tube has holes every metre.

Engineers send a special device called a packer

to the spot where the ground is settling.

The packer precision-injects grout to fill up any voids...

..lifting the earth back to its original position,

protecting plasterwork, preventing further cracks

and keeping buildings - like the House of St Barnabas - safe.

TAM number 46 then, yeah?

This shaft in the southeast corner of Soho Square

is the "office" for grouters Lloyd and Tony.

This is what we call a packer.

This rubber part here will inflate.

That'll form a seal to prevent any grout coming back out.

90 metres, a long way to push the packer,

but you take the rough with the smooth, I think.

-Two, six, one, five!

-OK! Two, six, one, five.

Lloyd and Tony spend up to 12 hours a day down this shaft,

packing holes under Soho Square.

OK, that's depth, inflate the packer.

That's ready to start pumping!

Yeah, pumping now.

I've been on the job for about 16 months.

Tony's been with us for about...six months?

We generally tend to stick together as a team as well, you know.

Yeah, we do come... not too close obviously,

you don't want to get too close in a place like this.

You get used to talking to yourself but apart from that it's all right.

Thirteen, three, zero, seven, five!

OK, up on the reel.

Whoa!

Now we're off to Crossrail in their new offices

and we usually meet with them regularly

to survey the monitoring, to discuss any particular

operations that have taken place, and then we can co-ordinate.

Welcome to the House of Barnabas periodic meeting.

The team will meet once a month for the next four years to keep check

on Soho's historic buildings.

I did report that everything was fine.

Then the summary sheet won't have any triggers,

unless we get realignments. THEY ALL LAUGH

They'll keep a close eye on the House of St Barnabas,

and its exquisite rococo plasterwork.

The charming lady here has survived to keep us entertained

in the 21st century, and I hope for many more.

One stop west of Tottenham Court Road, in the heart of Mayfair,

engineers are building Crossrail's new Bond Street station.

New Bond Street is one of the most expensive streets in Europe

so it's definitely one of the poshest parts of London.

Any settlement that's generated in this area

could potentially cause damage to buildings, so we spend a huge amount

of time, money and effort making sure that doesn't happen.

We've established a network of grout shafts

and by doing that we can physically lift whole buildings,

the whole area if need be,

and we can make sure there's no damage to any buildings.

Building grout shafts in the congested heart

of London's swankiest district solves one problem,

but means compromises must be made.

This shaft sits right next door to Bonhams -

a fine art auctioneers established over 200 years ago.

Lot number 36, ladies and gentlemen.

A splendid Imperial vase.

Start the bidding here at £400,000.

400,000 is offered. 420.

As you can see, it's a very tight site here, there's very little room.

And you can see how close Bonhams' building is.

It's only a metre or so away from the edge of our grout shaft.

£700,000.

750.

800.

850.

Attending an auction is incredibly exciting.

I've been in the business for 30-odd years and,

yeah, your adrenaline goes, it's an exciting spectacle, if you like.

It is like putting on a show.

One million pounds. There's the bid.

£1,250,000, I'll take.

Quite sure, no more for you?

I'm selling for £1,250,000.

All done?

The priceless, the fragile, the unique -

items for sale must be carefully exhibited in Bonhams gallery.

We've got a very special sale coming up

where we're going to have about 34 select motorcars.

The sale content value is around about 13, 14 million pounds.

James needs to get 14 vintage cars through Bonhams'

back alley and into the showroom for sale.

This is where Crossrail's grout shaft is

and they've put these metal plates on top of the circle

so that we can get our motorcars over the grout shaft.

We've not yet tested getting a car in here,

so getting the first car over that plate will be one of those

sort of moments that you have your heart in your mouth.

So this is the pinch point here, 230 centimetres,

but realistically you've got about 210 centimetres, with a little

bit of contingency either side.

The slightest scratch is going to affect them visually

and affect their value as well.

On paper it works but we all know on paper is not necessarily

what it's like in reality.

Across town, in London's financial heart, lift supervisor Steve

is fuelling up for the day ahead.

You can't beat a good cup of coffee in the morning, can you?

Bit expensive down here, though.

Well, up north I could get about four cups, a night out with me whippets,

maybe buy a couple of pigeons and still have a tanner left.

Right, lads, come on then.

The crane originally booked for this lift has been

damaged on another site.

They've hired in the biggest replacement they could find,

but it might not be big enough.

The crane's turned up and he's only got 52 tonnes of ballast

with him, which is adequate to do all but the last lift.

Without enough ballast to stabilise the mobile crane,

the heavy load could cause it to topple.

Steve's team must source extra ballast for the biggest lift - fast.

Obviously what he's got on now isn't sufficient for the heavier lifts

later on in the day,

but it's good enough for what we've got to load out this morning.

Start taking her up, mate, we'll get it over the section.

All the way.

The team make headway, hauling the lighter parts

of the crawler off site.

Right, mate, start taking her up.

Leaving the 44-tonne base section until last.

That's lovely that, mate, no bother.

You've just got to be careful of the buildings,

people walking underneath.

The heaviest load we've got today is the car body of the crane,

it's 44 tonnes all up,

we need the full 96 tonnes of ballast on the crane to lift that.

They urgently need the extra ballast to arrive on site

to finish the job and reopen Moorgate

in time for the Monday-morning rush hour.

CAR HORNS

Crossrail's road closures in the city are a bane for motorists,

especially London's 23,000 cab drivers.

Cabbies'll moan about everything.

But you've got to have a good moan if you want to live in London.

Mike Zihni has been a cab driver for 12 years.

Crossrail's made all the roads rotten.

This area is where the gridlock is.

Haven't been able to go up and down these streets for four years.

You can't do the rat runs any more,

so they've messed up what we call the dirty dozen - dozen streets

that get you through the north part of Soho, to get out of it.

They're like little arteries into a heart.

One or two of them start shutting, boom, boom, boom.

CAR HORN

I've seen cabbies, like, pulling their hair out, foaming at the mouth,

crying almost on the dashboard.

DELUGE OF CAR HORNS

You've just got to keep your cool and just go with the flow and

not get too stressed out about it all, you'll just drive yourself mad.

If you want to work in it, you've got to put up with it.

Underneath Oxford Street,

the tunnel boring machine

is marching towards Tottenham Court Road.

It's a critical time for Tim Morrison,

who heads London Underground's engineering team.

Constructing Crossrail is like

undertaking open-heart surgery on a patient whilst that patient is awake

because we're trying to maintain

the operation of the railway as it is without disrupting it at all.

There are 31 locations where Crossrail are doing something

that has the potential to affect London Underground.

It could be that they're digging a very large hole close to us,

it could be that they are doing some demolition work,

for example, near to our railway.

Each generation of engineers faces the same challenge

upgrading London's transport networks

to keep the city moving.

Back in the '60s, it was building the new Victoria Line that

threatened to clog vital arteries.

NEWSREEL: Ten-and-a-half miles of route, twelve stations,

eleven of them at intersections with one or more existing lines.

And the biggest engineering enterprise is at Oxford Circus.

Oxford Circus is just a stone's throw away from Tim's office.

We're standing on the junction of Oxford Street and Regent Street.

Probably one of the busiest interchanges in the whole of London, I would think.

In 1963, engineers had to build a new ticket hall

for Oxford Circus, directly underneath this busy junction.

It would take almost five years to construct.

So instead of closing the road they built a giant bridge across it,

to keep traffic moving while they dug underneath.

NEWSREEL: The intention was to erect the bridge in one long weekend -

the August Bank Holiday weekend, 1963.

The area took on a beleaguered look as D-Day came nearer.

Buses re-routed and traffic diverted, policemen deployed

and essential services endangered.

And so zero hour arrived, 1.30 on the Saturday afternoon.

And it was raining - of course(!)

Then the hardware started arriving.

The largest of the girders was 35 feet long

and weighed just over five tonnes, but the iron fighters were

tossing them around as though this was the Braemar Games!

There's no bolting down, which saved time. And bolts.

And they can't shift because the whole structure interlocks.

So it went on for the rest of Sunday.

And we were still waiting for the bit that didn't fit.

There was something like 245 individual steel elements

that were slowly assembled and they got it right first time.

And right on the dot, 6.30am, Tuesday the 6th of August, 1963,

with all services functioning, the first traffic crossed.

Keeping the buses moving, keeping cars moving, and that's allowed them

to be progressively excavating the soil below the Circus itself.

If we don't learn lessons from the past,

we won't be able to do the more challenging projects of the future.

So, 50 years ago almost to the day,

we had this incredible feat of engineering,

and 50 years later we're about to send a tunnelling machine

through a very congested part of Tottenham Court Road station.

There are now just two days to go

before Crossrail's tunnelling machine

goes through the Eye of the Needle.

It's going to get a lot of attention from everybody

and we want to get it right.

Do you know how expensive this photoshoot is?

It's going to be a very close encounter.

The ruler's showing how close this 7.1-metre, 900-tonne

tunnelling machine is going to LU operational infrastructure.

This is our TBM and this is the pile bottom.

-Wow, that it tight, isn't it?

-It's unbelievable.

That's how good we are.

If we actually hit the Northern Line platform,

then London Underground would have to close the station.

We've looked at where all the different structures are and we've

convinced ourselves that there is an eye that we can go through.

There's just five centimetres' margin for error as Willie lines up

his tunnel boring machine with the Eye of the Needle.

Yep, OK!

His eyes and ears on-board is graduate shift engineer Ed Batty.

We're now in the TBM control cabin, and from this little room

we can control all the systems on the machine.

It's also where we control the navigation from as well.

And the steering's here, basically.

These represent the rams, there's 22 rams, these numbers,

so if you want to go down you put more pressure on the top.

Although the team can fine-tune the direction of their tunnel,

as they pass through the Eye of the Needle they need to be sure

they're lined up precisely with the tunnel's intended route.

We're coming up to the Northern Line and it's under a metre below us.

That line will still be operating,

so there's going to be the day-to-day commuters whizzing

underneath us while we tunnel over the top, unnoticed.

We'll even be able to hear the trains as we pass over,

it's that close.

And we only get one chance to build this tunnel

so we have to get it right.

The team must know exactly where they are at all times.

And, crucially, where they're headed.

To guide them,

they've rigged a clever device behind the head of the machine.

It constantly fires a laser towards prisms - in front and behind -

telling them if they're staying on track or veering off course.

They reposition this guiding light at each bend in the tunnel.

This laser precision is critical to steering the tunnelling machine

through the Eye of the Needle.

So when we reach that position

we need to be super good at what we're doing.

There's no room for error.

We've got a series of targets in the tunnel,

they keep being built as we build the rings,

so this machine fires a laser at that position, it knows where it is.

If you're on a straight bit of tunnel,

the laser can go quite a distance without hitting anything.

If you imagine we're on a curve, we need to move this quite often.

There's a team of surveyors that come down here

and their sole job is to make sure that bit of kit

is in the right place and it's working accurately.

THEY SPEAK SPANISH

The driver is just constantly keeping an eye, making sure

he's in the centre of the target and taking the machine forward.

No steering wheel, but it's all done more like a computer game,

if you like, where he's trying to keep

the arrow in the centre of the target screen.

We'll be in tight control, so what's going on in here will be

very precise and we have to be absolutely spot on.

Oh...

Yep, OK.

They use the lasers to line the tunnelling machine up

to pass over the Northern Line platforms and under the escalators.

This is the closest a machine of this size has ever got

to an operational railway tunnel.

It's tight, it's going to be interesting, the next four or five shifts.

It's not far off, it's all getting very exciting now.

One stop west, over at Bond Street...

We've got a layout of the plan of where the cars are going

to get positioned.

..Crossrail's engineers have modified their grout shaft here,

so Bonhams can get 14 vintage cars into their saleroom

for a multi-million-pound auction.

It's the first time we've done something like this.

We'll bring them down in here into Haunch of Venison Yard,

which as you know is the back entrance of Bonhams.

Whoa, whoa, whoa!

It's pretty cool. It's a prestigious car, it's amazing.

I would like to know how old it is

and how it's in such good condition, it's amazing.

As you are!

Come on, boys!

This is ridiculously tight down here.

This is the bit where we get very, very close to Crossrail.

Anyway, we were going to use the cheapest car first off to see

whether it worked, but anyway, we've got

a £300,000 Clement as a test case.

It's a 1903 Clement Talbot that's 110 years old

and it's the oldest motor car in the sale.

First one in, yes!

So far, so good. We've got a one-car sale at the moment.

As you can see, we've got a bit of a Rolls-Royce traffic jam behind us.

We've got a Rolls-Royce 20 horsepower,

which is a car from the late 1920s.

It's good, keep it like that.

Straighten up, keep coming, keep coming, keep coming... Straight.

And the Rolls-Royce Phantom 1.

With a combined value of almost £1 million,

the first three cars make it through the pinch point without a scratch.

Very, very heavy.

Two and a half tonnes.

-You must have had your Weetabix this morning!

-Yeah, I did, yeah!

It's quite nice, that - wouldn't mind it myself.

If I had a chauffeur, I suppose.

One, two three! It's very close.

The Bentley S1 Fastback was the one that was most pressing on us

with the width where the Crossrail gantry is.

In their day, they were the fastest four-seater motor cars

on the planet, so they were really quite an important motor car.

OK, you're in.

Jeez!

Watch your back, here comes the Aston Martin DB6...

Right, has it got brakes?

The last few cars finally arrive.

It was a case of working with one another.

You've got to suffer some pain for the gain.

You can land at Heathrow and literally get to us

at New Bond Street in an obscenely short amount of time.

If Crossrail didn't undertake this construction here,

we wouldn't see the benefit.

After a quick polish,

the vintage vehicles are ready to go under the hammer.

They sell for the grand sum of almost £17 million.

C'mon, Tubsy, let's get down there.

All right then, la.

Over at the Liverpool Street site,

Steve's keeping a close eye on two teams this afternoon.

We were winning 3-0 at half-time.

I've got a bit of a shrine to me team in the front of the van,

the mighty Wolverhampton Wanderers.

That's me monkey - he goes everywhere with me. Done some miles, he has.

He's a big Wolves supporter and I'm a big Liverpool supporter, and

he's very, very bitter, over anyone else who's in the Premiership.

The ladies see this badge in your front window

and they just flock to it and they can't help 'emselves.

It's like a magnet for women. Yeah.

Don't tell me missus.

The extra 44 tonnes of ballast finally arrives.

Steve can now disconnect and lift out the two giant tracks...

Everything's going tickety-boo.

Look at that, thing of beauty!

He just needs one more thing to go his way.

You'd have known if they'd have lost,

cos your phone would've been going like mad.

-Everyone else would let you know.

-Yeah.

I'm in a good mood now. Wolves have won 4-0 today.

What more can you ask for, eh?

4-0! Get in, my son!

This is the right crane, isn't it? It's not the other one?

It's final lift of the day, lads. Obviously it's the machine now.

We're going to spin her in the hole so she's the right way round

when she comes to going on the back of the wagon.

We'll get this up and on, like.

-Let's do it, lads.

-Let's do it, let's fall in love?

Me arse ain't hanging out, is it?

The delays mean Steve can't start the biggest lift

until the very end of the day.

Right, you got the front end here

just starting to come off the deck now.

We might have to just inch it up

to get over this cherry picker, mate, all right?

Just pinch her up mate,

just so it's going over the top of that Harris fencing.

Hand you over to them lads, Nick, while I come up to the top...

Whoa! Whoa!

Just hang fire there.

Yeah, spot on, mate, keep going down, keep going down.

Weight's off, weight's off, Steve.

Good man, sound job that, Nick, beautiful.

All me lads are safe,

no damage to any equipment,

you can't ask more than that, can you?

And Wolves have won 4-0 today.

Win here for all this and a win for Wolves.

Cheers, lads, thank you very much. High-five, Lee.

C'mon, let's get up to t'North.

With the site clear, work can now begin digging out

the 40-metre-deep hole that will form Liverpool Street Station's

new ticket hall.

In four years' time,

it will be packed with up to 70,000 commuters each day.

Job done, the team can open Moorgate

in time for the Monday-morning rush hour.

Right, Craig, I'm going to open my side now.

Right, your first cars are coming through.

At Tottenham Court Road,

the 1,000-tonne tunnel-building monster is finally entering

the Eye of the Needle.

Welcome, everyone, to Sunday morning, the 8th.

This is the day Steve and Willie's team has been working towards.

That's where we are at the moment,

just touching the side of Charing Cross Road.

-We're under the site of the old Astoria Theatre, aren't we, Willie?

-Yep.

Today, the tunnel boring machine

will reach the narrowest point of its route across London.

So the crossing starts on back shift this afternoon

-and I think we're going to be there.

-Yep.

Today is the critical day, it's the start of passing over

the Northern Line and so this is the critical point.

The culmination of a lot of work over the last couple of months.

So people getting off the train in the next hour or so

will not realise that above their head is a 900-tonne,

7.1-metre-diameter tunnelling machine.

It's vital the crossing goes unnoticed,

or passengers on the Tube platform below could panic.

General comment just to say be aware of proximity of LU assets.

I mean, I would like Ed to keep an eye on the belt.

Yeah, just extra vigilance.

So over the next 20 rings

we're directly above the Northern Line platform.

The Eye of the Needle. We're just about to go through it.

PHONE RINGS

Hello?

-Is that Ed?

-Hi, Steve, how you doing?

We've got one more ring to go before the cutter head gets in line

with the angle of the northbound line.

Tim Morrison of LU said he was down this morning.

He was there and he said he could hear the TBM and hear the miners.

We're that close, so he can actually hear what we're doing here?

Yes, he could hear, but that was with no trains running.

Our one concern is that there are cracks within London clay,

some of the water could ease out and find the simplest

path of travel, which could be the big platform tunnel.

The TBM cutter head is now directly above the Northern Line

northbound station platform, so about 850mm below my feet

is the crown of their tunnel, so not a big distance at all.

You see where there's a blockwork wall here,

just behind the tiled edge -

that is pretty much the centre line where the tunnelling machine

is actually crossing this structure.

Sam is one of the guys who's been based down on the platform.

He's specifically looking for any fluid ingress from the tunnelling machine

because that's something that we are concerned is a possibility.

The tunnelling machine at the moment is quite literally above the tunnel crown.

There is that apprehension because there is a small risk

that we could see some ingress,

and so I guess that makes it more exciting.

With the tunnelling machine now inside the Eye of the Needle,

the team must continue their vigil throughout the night.

As London sleeps...

..the 150-metre-long earth-eating giant

continues its relentless drive.

Willie, got an update where we are?

Yep, we're building 3024 just now.

The team - and machine - make it through the tight spot.

Yep, OK!

No passengers panicked, no platforms evacuated.

We've passed over two platform tunnels

with a 900-tonne tunnelling machine.

That's even a first, I think.

-Yes, it is, yeah.

-Cheers.

The lads have been working down here really hard

and so have the guys up in the control room.

A big relief. I'm chuffed that we've done it so well

and we've had such good results.

We've done it, yeah, got through the tricky spot.

The trains have kept running,

passengers haven't known that we've been there.

It's been a great achievement and I'm glad to be part of that team.

The team leaves a perfectly formed Tube tunnel in their wake.

There are still two huge jobs to complete.

Finish digging the 42 kilometres of tunnels...

You can't be normal if you go underground, can you,

earn your living in the bowels of the earth.

..and construct ten new stations,

each the size of a cathedral, before the trains can run.

It's difficult to appreciate the scale of it.

The station is designed to deal with 32,000 people per hour.

It's absolutely huge.