Ready, Set, Dig: the Northern Line Extension on the London Underground

This March, London will start six months of digging for a two-stop extension of the city's underground train system.

January 26, 2017, 10am PST | Casey Brazeal | @northandclark

Mark Wild, London Underground MD, Wandsworth Council leader Ravi Govindia, and Val Shawcross, deputy mayor for transport pose in front of a Northern Line tunnel boring machine.

Martin Hoscik

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The London Underground is getting two new stations. The project is expected to cost £1.2 billion Pound Sterling (1.5 billion USD) and take six months to dig. The extension will include a station at Nine Elms and Battersea Power Station in South London and move a tremendous amount of earth. "The machines will tunnel at depths of 26 metres for six months, excavating more than 300,000 tonnes of earth," Jonathan Prynn writes for the Evening Standard.

"Mayor Sadiq Khan confirmed the start date for the first major addition to the Tube map since the late Nineties as two gigantic tunnel boring machines - named Helen and Amy - were unveiled in Battersea." Prynn reports. The machines are named for a British astronaut and an aviation pioneer, respectively. Mayor Kahn expressed his belief that the additional transit options should give a boost to the area.

Full Story:

Northern Line extension: Tunnelling work on £1.2bn extension to Battersea to begin in March

Published on Friday, January 20, 2017 in The Evening Standard