Another two months nearer to Elizabeth Line services commencing and so it is time to release
the next batch of Abbey Wood Crossrail pictures.
Well over 8,000 of them now.
Those two months have seen three Crossrail trains parked at Abbey Wood
and over the past three weeks they have occasionally been trundling up and down the line in daylight hours; I saw one enter the tunnel portal at Plumstead.
Network Rail has vacated its Felixstowe Road headquarters and the buildings are
gone. Remaining staff have to walk a mile to a Portacabin alongside the Eynsham
Drive bridge. Why they went prematurely is unknown but Bexley Council is in the
process of transferring ownership of the Felixstowe Road car park site to their
in-house developer BexleyCo who will sell it for housing.
The 20 space station car park has been completed bar the entrance barriers and minor platform works are
progressing. The central platform footbridge is still being fitted out and escalator
adjustments occasionally take place.
The northern Felixstowe Road entrance is also nearly completed, there is now a gate and a
ramp and internally it no longer looks too much like a building site.
Bexley Council has still not begun work on the surrounding public realm nor can
it until the recent planned drainage works are complete on the Gayton Road
side, however a good deal of surveying has been seen over the past week.
Work on the Gayton Road staircase indicates that it will be boxed in to prevent the
local loons aiming missiles at passing trains.
The Thames Estuary 2050 Growth Commission has lent its support to
extending Crossrail out to Ebbsfleet - as if
there was any chance it wouldn’t! Perhaps by 2050 someone will
have invented a skyhook that can support the flyover without need of a central
support column. By then it will be 80 years old so perhaps a new one wide enough
to accommodate two lanes of traffic in each direction will be built. If
the current flyover works actually include six lanes, two of them for
bicycles, it will be a very tight squeeze indeed.
