Published by Rail Engineer on Mar 22, 2016
Chris Binns was the head of engineering for the f6.5 billion Thameslink programme for six years, one of Network Rail’s biggest infrastructure challenges to date. However, in June 2015, he swapped the north to south London line project for the new east to west link now under construction known as Crossrail. Chris became the chief engineer of this £14
billion project which is, without doubt, Transport for London’s (TfL) biggest infrastructure challenge to date.
Chris replaced Chris Dulake who, now that the tunnelling work and associated heavy civil engineering (his speciality) has been successfully completed, has moved on to an even bigger project, the £50 billion High Speed 2 line. Chris Bins now reports to Crossrail’s technical director, Chris Sexton. Yes, another Chris!
Rail Engineer visited Chris Bins recently to find out how life in his new role is panning out for him now that he has completed his first six months. His immediate response was “responding to the sheer volume of technical challenges” He added that these challenges are not necessarily more complex than those he experienced at Thameslink, but the scale has increased significantly.
As readers will be aware, unlike the Thameslink project, which is being successfully built around a fully functioning urban railway, Crossrail includes a new central core consisting of 42km of newly bored tunnels. There are also 10 new Crossrail stations being built, some in very complex locations – Paddington, Bond Street and Liverpool Street to mention a few. In addition, there are complex redesigned track layouts both west and east of the capital, extending out to Reading in the west and Shenfield in the east.
