'Ideal' canal ignored in favour of lorries

Published: Friday, 09 March 2012

LININGS for a Crossrail tunnel portal cast at a works by the side of a canal that are needed just two miles away, again by the canal, are to be transported by lorries along an already overcrowded road.

Lorries will be streaming night and day through West London delivering thousands of concrete tunnel lining sections to the canalside Crossrail tunnel portal at Westbourne Park near Paddington, yet the linings are being cast at the Old Oak Common Railway Depot next to the Grand Union Canal (pictured) only two miles away near Willesden Junction, reports Del Brenner.

Beside the canal

Thousands of tunnel sections are already being stockpiled at the rail depot beside the canal as this recent photo taken from the canal towpath shows.

London Assembly Member Murad Qureshi, who is chair of the GLA London Waterways Commission, makes it clear in his blog The Qureshi Report that he strongly disapproves of the use of lorries to transport the tunnel linings, when using the canal would clearly be of great advantage and most practical.

Busy lorry routes

The blog reveals that on 1st March a planning application for an alternative lorry route for transporting the tunnel linings to the Crossrail tunnel portal was withdrawn at the last minute from the Westminster planning meeting.

The route was for hundreds of lorries to travel down Chepstow Road, and as it has been withdrawn by Crossrail the residents of Notting Hill Gate and Bayswater will have a reprieve. But all the lorries will now travel along the seriously congested Harrow Road. This includes the articulated lorries being allowed to cut across the heavy traffic at a no-right-turn junction which will cause serious disruption.

An empty canal

The photo shows Murad Qureshi on Carlton Bridge over the empty and forlorn Paddington Arm of the Grand Union Canal in West London. The canal is ready and waiting to carry the Crossrail tunnel segments into the Westbourne Park site beside the canal where the huge boring machine will soon be working day and night tunnelling across London. The tunnel portal site can be seen in the distance on the canal bend below the A40 Westway.

A stitch-up

Murad Qureshi complains that with the lorry movement application being withdrawn:

"This can be seen for what it always was—a stitch-up against the canal option to move the tunnel linings from Old Oak Common to Paddington.

"It was clear something was afoot right from the out-set, as the application was only validated by the City of Westminster on the last working day before Christmas Eve in 2011 when it had been with them a few months by then."

Murad Qureshi also reveals that in any case the planning officers were going to recommend refusal which is why, he says, that Crossrail decided that they might as well withdraw the application as they had got what they wanted, and added that at a previous meeting on 23rd January when he questioned Crossrail, 'the contractor BFK confirmed that no effort had been made to cost and entertain other options like canal and rail, other than lorries along the Harrow Road'.

Crossrail working at cross purposes

Looking at the Crossrail contractor's environmental statement and contrasting this with the reality, Murad Qureshi says that it gives some comical lines about what contractors will say to get big public contracts.

For example, the contractors are committed to 'maximising benefits and minimising adverse impacts to the environment and neighbouring communities' in delivering Crossrail projects. Also they pledge to assess the 'potential environmental impacts of all operations', and remove or mitigate these risks throughout the design and construction phases (some of the Government requirements in the Crossrail Act 2008), with Murad adding:

"None of this was done or achieved by the contractor in this instance as they doggedly pushed the lorry option as the only way to move the tunnel segments to the Westbourne Park tunnel portal."

The tunnel construction site could hardly be more accessible to the canal, as it is only yards away from the canal on the other side of the Westway as shown in the above photograph.