Platforms and Plague Pits The Fifteen Billion Pound Railway

Underneath the streets of London,

an army of more than 10,000 workers

is building the most ambitious railway in Britain for a generation.

OK!

Crossrail.

A new subterranean train line

connecting Heathrow Airport in the west

to the booming city in the east.

Constructing Crossrail is like undertaking open-heart surgery

on a patient whilst that patient is awake.

Costing almost £15 billion,

constructing this 120km link

is the biggest engineering project in Europe.

When we go through this gate, you'll see it's a very different world

on the other side of the fence.

It's a strange, dark world.

Not many people get to see it at this stage.

One of the greatest challenges -

building ten cavernous stations.

A good place to put your worst enemy, isn't it?

It's difficult to appreciate the scale.

The trains will carry 1,500 people.

The station is designed to deal with 32,000 people at peak.

Working in the heart of the city, engineers are uncovering its past.

We have come across some human remains within the shaft.

It's a full skeleton at the minute.

And face a constant battle to keep London moving.

This used to be a bowling green for the City of London.

It was somewhat of an oasis beforehand,

in the middle of this area.

But I plug myself into my headphones

to try and drown out some of the noise.

This is the inside story of the epic endeavour

to build London's new underground.

London.

Britain's business and financial heart.

London has two banking districts.

The historic Square Mile...

..and Canary Wharf, five kilometres to the east.

Crossrail's route will tie these hubs together,

fuelling economic growth.

The new railway will pass right across London,

cutting the commute from Heathrow Airport in the west

into the City to 30 minutes.

It will connect key mainline train stations

with major shopping districts,

and the new City at Canary Wharf.

The 40 worksites needed to build this railway

are bound to cause some disruption.

I'm sure when it's up and running, it'll be a marvellous thing.

But I'm not sure full consideration's been given

to the traffic.

It just makes more congestion

and it's the person in the cab that pays, cos they're sitting in traffic.

London's a funny place, man.

It can run smoothly, then gridlock for no reason.

Crossrail's done a good share of that, a good 60%-70%.

I'll probably never even use it!

But Crossrail estimates that 200 million passengers a year will.

One of the biggest tasks facing engineers

is to construct the ten new central stations.

Canary Wharf will be the largest on the line.

Leading a team of over 400 workers here is Michael Bryant.

What we're creating here is a passenger-handling facility

that will deal with between five and ten people per second.

I'm getting towards the end of my career now

and I can't really think of a better one to go out on than this,

to be quite frank.

Employment here has quadrupled over the last decade.

The new railway will help ease the pressure.

This is my third tour of duty, if you might say, at Canary Wharf.

I was here on phase one when I did a lot of the early work

on the logistics and I was responsible for redesigning

the DLR station and delivering that.

And it really just instilled into me how important

infrastructure and transport is to the future of developments.

Canary Wharf's station will be 250m long.

And Michael's team is constructing it underwater, in a dock.

They sank a vast, watertight, concrete box

to form the station's walls.

Concrete pillars anchor it into the dock bed.

They drained out more than 40 Olympic swimming pools of water,

then dug down to create four floors below water level

and two floors above.

Now the team face a series of challenges

to transform this concrete box into a station.

First they must build the platforms.

Then install the escalators and ventilation system.

Their toughest task -

assemble its unique roof from 1,500 timber beams

that will house a public garden open 24 hours a day.

The roof of this £500 million station has been designed

by world-renowned architects Foster and Partners,

famous for the City's Millennium Bridge and Gherkin.

Canary Wharf Group, who own this site,

are investing £150 million to get the station they want.

The brief to Foster, which was probably quite a brave...

brave way to go, actually, was we want something

that's totally different from everything else on the Canary Wharf.

And I think we've got that, so we're very pleased.

The roof will be curving and arching up over, like a curved apex.

It'll be spectacular.

It'll be like a giant conservatory or orangery.

That's the feel we've all been aiming for.

The 200-year-old West India Docks were once thriving quaysides.

-ARCHIVE:

-'These Docks originally had the monopoly of handling ships

'and cargos from the West Indies.

'Bananas for small boys, Saturday's picnic,

'or maybe the monkeys at the zoo.'

Fruit was off-loaded here from the Canary Islands,

giving the wharf its name.

But as ships grew in size and container ports took over,

the docks fell into disuse.

This vast area of land was reborn in the 1980s

as the new home of the financial services industry.

The site around Canary Wharf is still expanding fast today.

28 metres below water level,

lies the 21,000-cubic-metre heart of this new structure.

Four years from now,

24 trains an hour will be pulling up at the platforms here.

It's difficult to appreciate the scale of it.

The trains will carry 1,500 people.

The station is designed to deal with 32,000 people at peak

and I've got to build a complete platform.

That's my next objective.

Before Michael's team can start work on the platforms,

they must shift two giant visitors.

The machine you're standing next to is known as Elizabeth.

She's a tunnel boring machine, 147 metres long,

weighs about 1,000 tonnes.

Whilst I'm very pleased to see Elizabeth here

and indeed her sister, who's over my left shoulder, called Victoria,

I should be even more delighted when they've both gone

because what I want to do is get this space back to do my work.

The two massive digging machines have broken through

into one end of Canary Wharf Station.

Now they need hauling through to the other end of the station box,

so they can continue tunnelling towards Central London.

Checking that their transit runs smoothly

is second-generation tunneller Robert Bermingham.

I am one of many Berminghams

in the underground, or who have been underground,

but my dad and my brother currently work

on different sections of the project.

The only reason my brother and myself are in tunnelling

is because our father was.

These bad boys here are what I like to call God's roller skates.

It's actually a lifting bracket that will lift the machine up

using these jacks.

There is then a propulsion ram at the back of the machine.

There's no margin for error, as you can imagine.

If one of these was to roll off these gantries,

you're in a world of pain.

In charge of driving the machine through the box...

I think so.

..is Tommy Schoppe.

It's a brand-new system.

Testing by doing.

The machine, it go only this way.

And when you drive too much, it fall down.

That is a big problem.

-OK, boys, we're ready to move?

-Ready to go.

It's OK!

Rock'n'roll.

As the jacks push the machine forward,

the crew must extend the conveyor belt that runs out the rear.

When digging, the two-kilometre-long belt shuttles earth

dug by the machine out of the tunnel.

Four metres!

We've come through the station here at Canary Wharf

and now we're breaking through to the next section of tunnel,

which will take us to Whitechapel,

from Whitechapel to Liverpool Street,

and from Liverpool Street we'll go on then to Farringdon.

Three stops west on the edge of London's historic Square Mile,

engineers are already hard at work

building a new £440 million station at Farringdon.

Built from steel and stone,

Farringdon Station will connect

the Tube, Thameslink and Crossrail together.

150,000 people will use it every day,

making it one of Britain's busiest stations.

Historic buildings surround this area.

The Charterhouse is a Tudor mansion

built on the site of a 14th-century monastery.

Engineers are digging deep shafts near these listed buildings

to pump grout beneath the foundations to stop them sinking

as they build Farringdon Station underneath.

The excavations have led to a grim discovery.

We have come across some human remains within the shaft.

We started off with a skull and then found a shoulder section,

and it's a full skeleton at the minute.

That's what we uncovered so far.

I saw part of a skull come up so I got in,

got my trowel out, had a look round, and I found one.

Then there were two more,

aligned east-west,

which is what we'd expect from a medieval inhumation.

We can only really tell that they're adult inhumations.

In terms of what sex they are, it's...

it's very difficult to tell when you're digging them up.

The skull is really fragile.

It almost crumbles the second your trowel gets anywhere near it.

Some sites have up to 22 extra weeks built into their schedule

to accommodate archaeological investigations like this.

Crossrail's in-house archaeologist, Jay Carver,

has just four weeks before engineering work must resume here.

It's exciting. This is one of the first times

within this immediate area

that we've actually found several skeletons together.

We know from historic maps and other historic records,

that, within this area, was one of the emergency burial grounds

set out in the mid-14th century.

But it's never been constructed on, it's never been built on,

so it's very rare that there's an opportunity

to really look at the archaeology of this site in detail.

The graves could be linked to the Black Death

that killed up to 60% of Europe's population.

During the 14th century, at particular plague outbreaks,

half the population of London was wiped out.

It was a very serious time

and an awful lot of burying going on.

They'll be taken back to the Museum of London labs,

so there'll be a very close scientific inspection

of the skeletons to find out as much as we possibly can

about these individuals and how they got here.

Certainly very exciting for what we're going to find out about

what happened here 600 years ago.

Detailed forensic analysis will reveal if Jay and the team

have found London's long-lost plague pit.

Three stops back east at Canary Wharf...

..construction work is beginning on the most complex part

of Crossrail's station here -

its roof.

This ambitious, 1,000-tonne canopy will be built

from 1,500 timber beams...

..joined together using 860 steel connectors.

The wooden frame will be covered by air-filled plastic cushions,

enclosing the rooftop garden.

Overseeing the German specialists,

who have six months to assemble this giant 3D jigsaw...

HE SPEAKS IN GERMAN

..is Irishman Phil Duffy.

One or two of our lads don't speak much English,

so it helps a little bit to be able to speak a small bit.

HE SPEAKS IN GERMAN

THEY SPEAK IN GERMAN

OK, Prem, up on one on the hoist. Up on one.

Phil's not the only Duffy on the job.

My dad's off fitting one of the timber beams at the moment.

Slave driver, so I am. He gets the brunt of it.

I always had an interest in following in his footsteps, I suppose.

Phil's first milestone - assemble the roof's very first arch.

If we don't have these in the exact right position,

the timber elements won't fit.

Tiny bit down?

Everything has to be within the millimetre.

This is like the keystone.

The big crane will lift this in

and hopefully then it will slot in to the exact right position.

If this aligns up, the whole structure will follow through,

so this will be one of the most critical lifts of the whole thing.

Pre-fabricating a structure away from site

and then assembling it as a kit saves time and money.

It's a technique that's been used to startling effect in the past.

To house the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London's Hyde Park,

engineers designed The Crystal Palace to be built this way.

More than 1,000 cast iron beams and 300,000 sheets of glass

were cut precisely to size in Birmingham,

then transported to the site.

The hall was big enough to house six cathedrals the size of St Paul's

and it took just seven months to erect.

Each batch of wooden beams for Canary Wharf Station roof

is prefabricated at this factory in Austria.

No, I'm not a timber geek, I'm just a regular guy.

In charge is project manager Daniel Nieberle.

I always wanted to build timber houses when I was a kid,

so I started

studying timber engineering and ended up

as a project engineer for big-scale glulam projects in the UK.

Glulam is short for glue-laminated timber.

The beams are formed of thousands of planks,

glued together and cut to size.

We get spruce planks delivered from the sawmill

and we put those into a kiln.

Then we get dried down planks into our production line.

Workers scan each plank for imperfections

that could create weak spots

and remove those not up to scratch before gluing.

Glue will be applied onto several planks

and then all the necessary planks required for one glulam beam

will be put into a big press

where they will be compressed till the resin has cured.

It's immensely strong.

The weight to strength ratio is bigger than with concrete.

Once dry, they cut and sand the beams down to size.

This is actually already a proper glulam beam at the moment,

it just has to be made good looking.

Now the beams start to look really sexy.

Oh, yeah.

We've got wood.

That's a top view of our Crossrail station roof.

We could actually play Twister.

Applying those steel parts onto the timber beams is the final step.

All that's left afterwards is wrapping them up

and put them on the truck over to London.

Have you got a knife on that little Swiss thing of yours?

The roof's first arch needs a keystone,

a two-tonne timber unit that will join the structure together.

We're just about to put the centre section in place

using the tower crane.

We'll get everybody else out the way and hopefully it will go well.

As you slew round, mate, that should stay same orientation.

Heads up, heads up!

Nice and steady, inches at a time, please, mate.

Nice and steady. Come down on your wire.

The keystone is in position, but it's not a perfect fit.

Just trying to locate the bolts on each corner.

It's literally millimetres out.

If we have an issue here at one of these timber structures here,

it means it exaggerates as you go along the building

and our connections won't go in correctly.

For alignment they have to be perfect, within maybe five mil.

Hit it properly, Robin!

RAY LAUGHS

You can't beat the sledgehammer at the end of the day.

Yeah, that's it. Fairly chuffed, yeah.

Beautiful, beautiful! I like the way you work it.

Oh, yeah, I think I should have been a photographer. What do you think?

If you stand back and look at it, you can see the whole arch

from one side to the other side now, which is perfect.

This is a massive structure.

Like, when it goes to plan, you can't be happier.

Looking more than good, looking brilliant.

First milestone complete.

1,400 pieces of the jigsaw to go.

28m below dock level,

Crossrail's tunnelling machines have left the station's giant box.

Now contractors can get to work fitting it out.

First they must build the 240-metre-long platforms...

..then install the building's ventilation system

and nine escalators that will shuttle passengers down

from the ticket hall to the platform level.

Heading up the team is construction manager James Goonan.

I've never built a train station before,

never mind one in a dock, underwater.

One of the big issues is actually getting our materials down here.

We've got what we call a mole hole, which is the hole up there,

which goes up to the surface level.

Without full access to the mole hole,

we can't carry out any works down at this level.

There's no other way to get materials down other than the mole hole.

James must thread 580 pre-cast concrete slabs down

through this mole hole to the basement, to assemble the platforms.

It won't be easy.

He's just following us with it, where's he going?

THEY LAUGH

So, how many more panels you got to go in before the escalators arrive?

There's basically 150 left to go in from these.

It's already looking good down there. It's taking shape.

The pre-cast is coming down as I am talking to you, Adam.

The gantry crane's going ten hours a day, six days a week,

and it's the lifeblood of getting the platform built.

Minus four, please, Rocky.

James has just six weeks to get the platforms in place

before the escalators arrive.

The mole hole's the only way to get the escalators down

due to the size and the weight of them.

It'd be nice to have a bigger hole.

Two stops west of Canary Wharf,

engineers are constructing Crossrail's new station

at Liverpool Street.

The eastern ticket hall will sit 40 metres underground.

It's one of many sites across London

offering a portal into the city's past

for Crossrail's lead archaeologist, Jay Carver.

We're just outside the Roman and medieval city wall.

The historical significance of this site

is it is the site of the burial ground of St Bethlem Hospital,

which from 1600s through to about 1800

was located just nearby in Finsbury Circus.

Nicknamed Bedlam,

Bethlem hospital had treated mental illness since the 13th century.

You got any idea how many individuals

we've taken out in this small hole so far?

Um...more than 50.

The burial ground, being a post-medieval site,

is very likely to be overlying earlier levels from the medieval

and possibly even Roman periods as well.

Digging deeper, the team uncover Roman skulls and pottery...

Oh, my God!

Got bones inside it!

..washed down to this site by an ancient river, the Walbrook.

We've got very many sites coming up

where we'll be doing this kind of investigation.

So we'll be undertaking works all across the job,

for every Crossrail site.

Liverpool Street Station will be one of several new Crossrail stations

serving London's traditional banking district.

Space here is at a premium.

To build the station, engineers had no option

but to commandeer London's oldest park, dating back to 1606,

Finsbury Circus.

They will need this area until 2018 for access

down to the station work site underground...

..a decision that's not proved popular with City workers.

It's really detrimental.

It has an adverse effect on environment,

and because we enjoy coming here to eat here.

People come to work, they want to have a healthy life!

-CONSTRUCTION NOISE

-It was somewhat of an oasis beforehand,

in the middle of this area,

but as you can hear, it's not really having that effect any more.

It is annoying. It's only five years.

In the grand scheme of things, it's not the end of the world, so...

Finsbury Circus is the subterranean gateway

for construction manager Jules Boyd and his crew.

This used to be a bowling green for the City of London

and we're going to put it back like that when we're finished.

A lot of people have likened this to an ant hill,

where you've got very small surface, sort of a lot of busyness,

but underneath, it's a whole network of tunnels.

Underneath the City,

Crossrail is carving out ticket halls and walkways

to create the new station.

Longer than two football pitches, the platforms connect

Moorgate Tube Station to the existing Liverpool Street Station

in the east.

Over a kilometre of winding passageways need burrowing out

to link the platforms together.

It's a strange, dark world.

Not many people get to see it at this stage either.

A little bit more work to do to make it passenger-friendly, I must admit.

It will look very different from this, I assure you,

and it hopefully will be quieter!

Jules' team use excavators to enlarge a pilot tunnel,

creating vast, underground spaces that will become the platforms.

Once dug out, they spray the clay walls with special concrete

called shotcrete.

It contains steel fibres that make it extra tough.

You can see the fibres here, which are the reinforcing things.

Don't put your hand on there, you'll get...like a porcupine.

All right, Jez!

The spray gun fires the concrete out of the hose

at over 100 metres per second,

turning the steel fibres into bullets.

You wouldn't want to be hit by it anyway,

steel fibres protruding from you.

Jules' second big city station build is one stop east, at Whitechapel.

I come down here quite often.

You find all sorts of fruit and veg that you've never seen before.

Most people walk along here and they see just the blue hoarding

and then some strange buildings up here,

and when we go through this gate,

you'll see it's a very different world on the other side of the fence.

Stretching out beneath the ground at Whitechapel

will be 640 metres of platforms.

Today, Jules is preparing for a major milestone -

the arrival of a tunnel boring machine

that will break through into the station,

connecting Whitechapel to the rest of the network.

This is where the TBM is heading towards us right now.

This is the bit we have to have done and it has to be right,

so there's not a chance of a big slab of shotcrete wall

falling into the tunnel of anything dramatic.

The end of Whitechapel's platform tunnel is rounded rather than flat.

If the tunnelling machine breaks through this thin wall,

it could damage the platform roof, causing up to a metre of cracking.

To prevent this, the team has built a solid concrete plug.

This reinforces the station walls.

But tougher than London clay may make the final drive

into the platform harder going for the tunnellers.

It's quite exciting, it's actually coming to fruition now.

Then we'll hit the wall.

There's communication so they can speak directly

with the TBM driver from this tunnel.

In the unlikely event that it's coming through over here,

they could say stop, for example.

On the other side of the wall, inside the tunnel boring machine,

Dave Shepherd and Paul Haycroft

drive the cutterhead into the concrete plug.

We can go up to 30.

The heads not liking being in...

Complete foam concrete.

We've probably got about four metres plus of this material to cut through

before we appear in the station.

The heat from cutting through the tough concrete

is beginning to cause serious problems.

The crew pump extra water into the cutterhead to prevent overheating.

But this is creating a troublesome concrete soup.

I see on the belt there's a lot of slop going up the TBM belt.

So for all the modern technology,

you'll see here that occasionally we have to resort

to traditional hand methods.

It's always quite exciting.

Everyone likes a TBM breakthrough, don't they?

If it's in the right place. I think these guys back here,

the surveyors, are looking a little bit nervous.

We should have had a little sweepstake before this.

We could have all put our Xs on.

Like pinning the...like pinning the tail on the donkey

Or spot the ball.

SQUEAKING

I swear the noise is coming from the right-hand side

rather than the middle, but...

While the tunnelling machine battles the heat,

all Jules and his team can do is wait.

One stop back east at Canary Wharf,

the new station's roof is slowly taking shape.

When complete, the entire building will be longer than its neighbour,

One Canada Square, laid on its side.

The sheer scale of the station

creates unique problems for its engineers.

During the daytime, as it heats up,

when the sun's on the building,

it will try to expand and then at night-time it will try to contract.

And if the building was a single structure,

the movements would be so large

that the building would actually try and tear itself to pieces.

So we've split it into three sections.

And that means that they can move relative to each other

without causing any problems.

They are kind of alive, yeah. It's quite a living, breathing thing.

Most of the station is built from reinforced concrete.

That's except for this stretch at the east end of the structure.

It's made from steel and passes over a road.

The steelwork also needs to take the weight of the gardens above,

which causes problems.

Steel behaves very differently to concrete.

It could be a problem. It's something that has to be allowed for

in the design of the roof because otherwise

the roof isn't going to behave as it's designed.

This steel section will be more flexible

than the concrete either side.

If the team built the roof across the steel,

then added the soil and trees afterwards,

the extra weight could cause the steel to sag,

pulling the timber roof down.

So before they build across this section, they must pre-stress it,

loading it with 300 tonnes to simulate the weight of the gardens.

Only then can they build the roof.

When they remove the weight,

the steel will temporarily spring back up

until they landscape this area, which will push the steel back down,

leaving the roof line perfectly level.

We needed 300 tonnes. 300 tonnes is quite a lot of weight to add.

But it needed to be done in a way

that we could take it off easily afterwards.

So we came up with the idea of using paddling pools

and it looked kind of cool having a load of swimming pools

on top of the roof.

They went on in August, so it looked quite inviting at the time.

Now it's November time, it's not quite so nice.

You can see the water here, actually. It's quite manky.

Now the steelwork is preloaded with the swimming pools,

it's safe to build the roof on top of it.

You're now pretty certain that will fit in

-with all the glulam that you've got.

-Yeah.

With the pools in place, Phil's crew can continue

piecing together the roof across the steel section of the station.

We have five mil tolerance to play with.

I'll adjust it, and then you can come back and re-survey it.

-OK.

-Make sure it's all right.

With another 200 pieces of the jigsaw locked together,

they can pull the plug on the pools.

The floor is going to lift very slightly

and it's going to take the roof up with it.

And then when we add the park landscape on later,

it'll push it back down and the roof won't have any extra stress in it.

At the new Farringdon Station site, Jay Carver's team of archaeologists

have uncovered 25 skeletons.

They think this was the site of an emergency burial ground

for victims of the Black Death and are waiting for confirmation

that they've found London's long-lost plague pit.

This burial ground has long been referenced in historical documents.

I mean, literally for 600 years it's been talked about,

but has never been found.

We're hoping to find out some crucial questions

about those skeletons we found -

precisely what date they are, can they be linked

to the 14th-century outbreak of Black Death?

Jay's sent the skeletons to bone expert Don Walker

for forensic analysis.

So, this is one of our individuals from Charterhouse Square.

Yeah, this is one of the ones we've been working on, one of the 25.

You will see nothing on the skeleton of a Black Death victim

that reflects that disease.

Right, so we have to look much closer, in microscopic...

Yes. So what we do is sample the teeth.

The teeth are a micro-bacterial time capsule.

The plague's DNA becomes trapped in the roots.

We sent off a tooth to have a look.

They sequenced the DNA and compared them to various diseases,

including Yersinia pestis, the plague,

and they found some matches.

It's pretty incontrovertible, really, that that's what we're looking at

with these 25 skeletons.

It seems... The evidence seems to fit with that, certainly.

The chances are if they were exposed to it,

they probably developed symptoms and probably died.

We can't be absolutely sure, but we know they were exposed to it.

This individual was a probable male.

We also want to look at the age to see at what age they died.

Once you're grown, it's to do with wear and tear.

Things we would look at would be the joint surfaces.

We think this person probably died between the ages of 26 and 35.

We have to be doing some research to look at things like strontium

and carbon and nitrogen,

not only to see where they may have come from,

but what their diet may have been.

And what we've found is there seems to be a mixture

of people who were born in London and people who were born elsewhere.

And, of course, London was a mixture of people who were born there

and people who migrated in, like today.

By that time, the 14th century, massive trade

and exchange all over Europe and even further afield.

We know, of course, the Black Death made its way by those processes.

-We've got a huge amount to write up and publish now.

-Yes.

Jay and the archaeologists have cracked the mystery

of the Farringdon bodies.

We've finally found evidence for this emergency burial ground

set out in 1348, more than 600 hundred years ago.

We've got an incredibly clear picture now of these individuals

and how they ended up in Charterhouse Square.

I think it's a highly significant find.

Three stops east, back at the new Canary Wharf Station,

with the platforms almost complete,

workers are installing the ventilation system.

The western elevation has three gaping holes,

behind which three fans will sit.

Bespoke stainless steel covers

will hide this backroom machinery from view.

The job of installing them falls to snappy dresser Neil Dutton.

Yeah, I've got this bit of a thing about shirts.

I get them custom made, what can I say?

Erm, I've got a big neck and a little body.

I'm probably the best-dressed construction guy on site.

We have been employed to clad the whole external section of this

with a stainless steel surround

to get to a finished product on the outside,

making it look sexy and pretty.

The station's ventilation system is critical to its operation.

Crossrail is spending £26 million on platform edge doors

to separate passengers from trains

and stop litter being sucked onto the tracks.

But the doors cause a problem.

A train rushing through a tunnel creates an almost perfect seal,

forcing air in front of it.

As trains pull into Canary Wharf Station, pressure will build

and needs releasing to avoid damaging the platform doors.

So a network of ventilation shafts not only draws away brake heat

but also allows the air to escape.

Three giant fans at each end of the platform

will help pull the excess air out to surface level.

This should relieve the pressure

and protect the platforms as trains arrive.

Neil's team must crane the vent covers down from the roof,

then winch them up into position.

OK, and we're not going to leave any rough edges on this, are we?

I don't want any damage or scratches. That's the only thing.

Exactly not. They cost quite a lot of money.

I think each frame is probably, with the stainless steel...

75,000 a piece.

We've never done anything like this before. It's new to us.

Gentlemen, this is a very important lift today.

I don't care about time, I care about precision and safety,

so let's just make sure we do this right.

Before we do, I need signatures on the back of this, please.

The crew must sign up to confirm they understand the lift plan.

Have we got anyone taller?

There's nothing better than seeing you bent over.

Yeah, we're good?

It's absolutely awesome.

Guys, we need to get hold of those lines!

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa!

There was a little tight spot there when it was up, as you saw.

That was the most concerning part.

That's it.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. That's it.

Pull his ass in, in over there.

Are we on?

We're good. That's the easy part. Yeah.

With the first covers down, they can hoist them into position.

A winch, pulley and crane hold the steel in place.

We see them as six halves.

They're actually three units, but they're six halves.

It does look quite spectacular when...

DRILL ROARS

..when you actually see them all completed.

It's going to be quite iconic when people are actually...

DRILL ROARS

..when people are actually walking by.

DRILL ROARS

# Get down with that! #

The gap to squeeze in the final vent cover is tight.

I tell you, when that thing's in there,

it's going to look bang-on, you know?

Disaster already. Milo! You never checked it, did you?

The holes in the bottom, they drilled too small, didn't they?

Ken, what's going on?

We need a jack.

-You need a jack?

-Yeah.

-Why, it's got to be lifted?

The bolt holes for the last section don't line up.

It's actually just, just out of alignment.

Every time you're dealing with steel

or you're dealing with any sort of raw material, there's movement.

They need some muscle to force it into position.

One, two, three!

This is the first time it's happened on the job.

It's not happened on any of the other ones.

That's construction. It happens.

The team tighten their nuts...

..securing the final vent cover into place.

This is stainless steel and it's absolute perfection.

Absolutely awesome.

And it's just got such sexy lines to it.

I mean, every building's got to have the sexy lines

and those stainless steel definitely got some sexy lines.

With the station's platforms assembled,

the first escalators arrive for installation.

The escalators are one of the key operational components

of the station. They're mission critical, if you like.

I think of this station as a people-processing facility.

People need to get in it, through it and safely out of it.

London's first subterranean railways

ran just a few steps down beneath the ground.

But as tube lines were dug deeper, engineers needed fast ways

to shuttle people down to the platforms.

Filing people in and out of elevators proved too slow.

One of the earliest solutions - a spiral escalator

installed at Holloway Road tube station in 1906.

The first underground escalators, as we know them today,

didn't arrive until 1911.

Nine escalators will take passengers down from Canary Wharf's ticket hall

to platform level.

Squeezing these machines down to the basement

through James' mole hole will be a challenge.

They come down on the gantry crane so there's four lifts,

the smallest ones are just under 2.1 tonne,

the biggest lift is 6.5 tonne,

then the four sections get bolted together.

It's a tight fit.

I think the larger piece that's going to come down this afternoon

is about seven metres long

and the mole hole itself is about five metres.

That's the biggest section, this one.

It's just the getting them down now,

through the tight headroom, is the crucial thing.

If we damage them we have to pay for them,

that's why we always have to have a look

before they come off the lorries.

No-one in the yard, is there?

Go round, Kev!

Right, down slowly! Fingers and toes!

We have to tilt it. It's very tight.

It's 50-50, but we'll get it anyway. We'll go for it.

'Ready? Down on these hoists, please. Down on these hoists.'

No problem, coming down now, coming down.

It's a steady descent through the station's four floors.

Go ahead.

We've just got to tip this now to come through the hole.

Yeah, it's tight.

One side's through, one side ain't.

We don't want to hit the slab because it will dent the escalator.

Just wait for the swing just to stop.

Whoa, that'll do.

It's through there now.

That'll do you. Whoa, whoa, whoa.

It was tight, but we knew it was always going to be tight.

Yeah, go on!

With the biggest section down, the other pieces are child's play.

Down slowly!

All the four sections are down.

Ready to start unwrapping them and joining some sections together.

I'm happy.

I can sleep tonight.

Last task - join the escalator sections together...

I love riveting. This is a very riveting job.

..and raise them into position.

Go on, muscles.

I need a man.

Love it.

Up you go!

Two notches up again!

Whoa! Hold it!

That's it.

What we're seeing here is the first real link between the platform

and the ticket hall.

The conduits, the umbilical cord,

if you like, that runs through the station, linking all the spaces.

Four years from now,

these escalators will be some of the busiest on the network,

carrying up to 100,000 people a day down to the trains.

2.5 miles west,

at the new Whitechapel Station.

Jules' team has waited three years for the tunnelling machine

to break through into their platform.

This will finally connect the station

into the 120-kilometre Crossrail network.

It's quite exciting. It's actually coming to fruition now.

So quite a select few get to witness it.

Oh, I got my lovely camera here.

I'm expecting to take a lot of pictures.

And maybe some personal ones for the family

to hopefully be as proud as I am.

The tunnelling machine

has made it 3.5 metres through the concrete plug.

During the course of the next thrust forward of the TBM,

we should be showing signs of breaking through the head wall

at Whitechapel.

So that's 900 mil, in theory, to the breakthrough.

-Is that correct?

-Yeah, yeah, approximately.

Although the wall might actually collapse before that.

It should do, actually.

Yeah, Roger, I'm with the TBM driver,

could you tell us what you can see, please?

Two big cracks and steam coming out?

The wall hasn't collapsed, then, yet, no?

Ooh, there we go!

First bit of muck fell off the face then.

And it was on the left-hand crack.

Oh, and another bit.

Any minute now, that slab of foam concrete is going to fall off

and show the face of the TBM, I hope.

There it goes!

It looks like dust, but it's mainly steam that's coming in.

This is more of a breakthrough for radio, isn't it, than television?

Can you see the full cutterhead yet or...?

No. You can't see anything, OK.

Haven't seen anything yet. All I've seen is dust!

One final push and the machine pulls into Whitechapel.

See the guys, the TBM crew coming through there now, which is nice.

Sort of a 'welcome to Whitechapel' moment.

You can probably see the view through

to some of the team on the Whitechapel side.

Dust is settling now a bit, so there you are.

You can see Whitechapel.

After three years of working towards the same goal,

the tunnellers finally meet the station builders.

-Congratulations and well done.

-No problem. Thank you.

-Spot on!

There was a lot of heat generating in the machine

and a lot of steam from the other side, there.

So, you could feel that from your end?

Oh, the heat was intense inside, yeah.

It's fairly surreal to be standing out in front of it.

What you've stood behind for so long.

The foam concrete did its job well, there.

The machine cut its way out of the ground, or into the station,

rather than barged in with large boulders falling.

I should be a photographer, shouldn't I?

You're a legend. Now I can show my mum.

One, two, three...

-ALL:

-Yeah!

Whitechapel Station is finally connected to Crossrail's tunnels.

In four years' time, at rush hour,

32,000 people will pass down the platforms here.

At Crossrail's Canary Wharf Station,

Phil's team is locking the last beams into place.

Everything's going perfect, thank God. Everything is good.

It's the biggest project that we've done.

It's something to be proud of, I suppose.

Final piece of the jigsaw - 780 inflatable cushions

that will fill the gaps and cover most of the rooftop garden.

In charge of this part of the build

is Roy Butcher and Christoff Schmidt.

-Do I look good?

-Very good.

-Is it straight?

He loves to hate me. I love to hate him.

-That's what we call teamwork.

-Teamwork, yeah.

Installing the cushions requires a head for heights.

So they've assembled a crew of highly trained specialists

from all over the world.

Romanians, Hungarians, Dutch, English...

Who's English?

-You?

-I'm Welsh!

-Ah, you're Welsh. I'm sorry.

-Yeah. Cut!

They're rock climbers and mountain climbers,

so they're used to heights, but, yes, a very skilled trade.

Basically, they're just unwrapping the cushion now.

It comes all folded up, they unfold it.

They have to put aluminium sections which run down the edge.

Then they'll connect it into the system,

connect the air pipes and blow it up.

Sounds simple, little bit more difficult.

Fitting the first cushion on the lower outside edge

will be a real test.

Below is a 20-metre drop.

Because we're installing the cushion almost on the vertical face,

there is no area for a safety net.

This is the most susceptible point of the installation,

is when it's opened.

If the wind catches it then that's the worst-case scenario.

Once it's got the rails on it and it's attached, it's secure.

They're now fitting the air inlet,

so any moment now you'll see the cushion inflating.

It is actually starting to inflate now.

One done, about 750 to go.

I'm a happy bunny.

It's growing, you know? It's getting more beautiful every day.

40 metres below the roof,

James' 240-metre-long platforms are almost fitted out.

It's an immensely satisfying project to walk away from.

It's probably a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity

to work on something like this.

Brushed steel louvres add the finishing touches to Neil's vents.

It might look poncey,

but the amount of engineering that's gone into this is outstanding.

I would say the whole team's proud.

And the final timber slots into place on the roof.

All our timbers are fitted. Everything is done now.

Someone else's problem now, I'm out of here. Back to Ireland.

THEY SING

Four years from now

and the ticket halls open.

The escalators start running.

Before then, the team must lay the tracks and build the trains.

London's population is set to pass nine million in 2018.

Only then will the architects of this £15-billion railway

discover if Crossrail is enough to keep London moving.