Channel Tunnel rail link construction at Stratford, east London. Photograph: Dan Chung
Today's Guardian carries a fantastic article and pictures about the construction of the Channel Tunnel rail link going into King's Cross Station in London.
Eight thousand workers from all over the world have toiled for seven years, first to bring the nation's first fast-track rail line up through Kent, then onwards through the sodden clay and shifting silt of the Thames flood plain, and now in tunnels up to 40 metres beneath the pavements of London. The target date is rushing up fast to meet them: from 2007, the trains of Eurostar are meant to be shooting through these subterranean passages like supercharged electric eels passing under sewers and water mains, tube lines and gas pipes, at the end of their journeys from Paris and Brussels.
Yet as far as London is concerned, this herculean labour - 15m cubic metres of soil and stone excavated for the open-cut route across the south-east from the Channel Tunnel portal near Folkestone and the twin-bore route under London; hundreds of interlocking construction contracts overarched by big-hitters of international engineering: Arup, Bechtel, Halcrow and Systra - has been almost invisible: obscured by hoardings, or buried even deeper than the tube.
Now I'm not sure that the subsequent contention - that nobody in London is aware of the development - is quite true, since King's Cross isn't far from Online Towers, and my journey in to and out of the city takes me past a veritable smorgasbord of construction sites... but it's certainly correct that this is one massive engineering project that has, so far at least, gone fairly smoothly.
If you've got five minutes, go and have a read.
