Photos From Inside Old Oak Common HS2 Station
How the main entrance to Old Oak Common will look. Image courtesy HS2
It's been a tricky year or two for the High Speed 2 (HS2) project. Government cuts have seen the rail route scaled back to a single phase between London and Birmingham. The project's intended terminus at Euston is in the balance, with private funding needed to make it happen.
Either way, the new interchange at Old Oak Common (OOC) is forging ahead. This new mega-station will be a major hub for HS2 (and, at least for a while, its London terminus). But the station is about so much more than the high speed line.
After taking a tour of the site, here's an update on the progress, and the answers to some common questions...
Where is this Old Oak Common place anyway?
A map showing the various rail lines running through the Old Oak Common area.
The station is being built on the site of former rail depots, just south of Willesden Junction and the Grand Union Canal, and just north of Wormwood Scrubbs. Two branches of the Overground bifurcate around it.
What's the point of Old Oak Common?
It'll be a major new interchange — the biggest in the UK — as well as serving a growing local population. The headline story is HS2 which will pass through here to Euston — or else terminate here, should the link to Euston be cancelled (see below). The route will be served by six subterranean platforms.
View of Old Oak Common showing the above-ground tracks, which will serve Elizabeth line, GWR and Heathrow Express. The roof will feature hundreds of solar panals. Image courtesy HS2
The other big deal is the Elizabeth line, which will run above the HS2 platforms for quick interchange. If you're travelling from, say, Canary Wharf or Liverpool Street to Birmingham, it'll be quicker to get the Elizabeth line to OOC and change to HS2 here, rather than going via Euston. Old Oak Common will be the 42nd station on the line, located between Acton Main Line and Paddington.
Great Western Railway trains and the Heathrow Express will also pass through and stop at OOC. So that's four major routes all converging on one station, which will handle an estimated quarter of a million people a day.
The site in November 2023. Looking east, the HS2 subterranean box is on the extreme left. Image Matt Brown
And there may be more. Two new Overground stations at Hythe Road and Old Oak Common Lane have also been scoped out for future development (see map)... but let's not confuse an already complicated set up by talking about those.
When will Old Oak Common station open?
Inside the station box. The two areas of rough concrete in the far wall are where the HS2 tunnels will eventually emerge. Image Matt Brown
Well there's the question. The HS2 project has suffered so many ups and downs that any projected opening date must be taken as tentative at best. This uncertainty is baked into official communications, with HS2 currently estimating "2029-2033". The Tories got through four Ministers for Transport (and four Prime Ministers) in a similar time span, so who knows?
How's progress going?
Workers manually layering rebar to reinforce the future track bed. Image Matt Brown
Mightily impressively, as it happens. The huge — and I mean HUGE — station box is 55% scooped out (Nov 2023), and should be fully gouged by the summer of 2024, with tunnel breakthrough from the west happening not long after. That's only the beginning, mind. Once the excavations are done, then work above ground begins. This includes building eight platforms for "conventional" rail (Elizabeth line, GWR, Heathrow Express), the station buildings and a ton of landscaping.
How some of the landscaping might look.
Old Oak Common Lane will also be reconfigured to allow double-decker buses to access the site. All this will take us towards the end of the decade, if not beyond.
What happens to all that soil?
Conveyor systems carrying spoil over Victoria Road. Image Matt Brown
OOC is one of the biggest digs ever undertaken in the UK. We're talking about 300 Olympic-sized swimming pools-worth of London clay. As per other recent projects like Crossrail, much of the spoil is being distributed across the country to create nature reserves and aid other environmental projects. But it's not just carted out on lorries. If you've walked around the North Acton area, you may have noticed a cat's cradle of overhead beams. These are conveyer systems, which take the spoil from the HS2 site, and other neighbouring developments, to a logistics hub near Willesden Junction, whence it leaves by rail. I'm told this system has taken an estimated 40,000 lorries off the road.
Will HS2 continue to Euston?
Inside the HS2 station box looking to the east. Trains will (hopefully) continue in this direction to Euston. Image Matt Brown
Well that's the other big question. The link on to Euston was recently called into question by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who wants to see the section built using contributions from the private sector. The feasibility of this plan has in turn been called into question, including by London Mayor Sadiq Khan who described it as "verging on fantasy".
The HS2 team are proceeding at Old Oak Common under the assumption that Euston will be green-lit at some point. To this end, the massive tunnel boring machines that would cut through to Euston will be lowered into OOC by the end of 2024 and then essentially mothballed until needed. It has to be this way so that engineers can build over the access shaft and complete construction of OOC station.
It's not clear what would happen to the TBMs if Euston were ever to be officially cancelled. Would they be left down there as curiosities for future historians, or somehow dismantled and removed? "We will then look at the options," was the non-committal answer I received to my question.
What else is in the Old Oak Common area?
Image Matt Brown
Cranes. Lots of cranes. The lands between Willesden and Acton are giddy-a-rumble with construction. It's not just HS2. A bewildering number of housing developments are also springing up, especially at North Acton. All these new neighbourhoods need new utilities, and so we encounter road works at almost every turn.
Image Matt Brown
Spare a thought for the residents who were here before this Mines-of-Moria-scale dig arrived. The site's main entrance sits directly opposite the residential Wells House Road. Living here over the past five years must have been... challenging. HS2 are keen to emphasise the regular community meetings in which they try to address the concerns[1] of neighbours. Still, give it a few years and these lucky residents will be just 42 minutes from Birmingham.
References
- ^ address the concerns (assets.hs2.org.uk)