HS2’s Old Oak Common station is set to be the biggest to be built since Victorian times with platforms enclosed in a record breaking box currently under construction. The scale of High Speed 2’s (HS2’s) Old Oak Common (OOC) station in west London is dizzying. Spread across 15ha of a former Great Western Railways depot just south of Willesden Junction, the new transport superhub will be the UK’s largest, busiest and best-connected railway station in a generation.
OOC will also be the largest subsurface railway station in the country and the largest ever delivered as a single project. Its 14 platforms comprise six high speed subsurface platforms and eight conventional surface platforms, between them serving HS2, Great Western Main Line (GWML), Crossrail and Heathrow Express services. The two parts of the station will be linked by a public concourse covered by a vaulted roof.
To accommodate the 450m long HS2 platforms an equally enormous station box measuring 850m long, 70m wide and 20m deep is being built. For reasons of rail geometry the box is longer than the platforms. This reinforced concrete station box will form the frame and base for the HS2 station building.
Delivering the box is BBVS, a joint venture made up of Balfour Beatty, Vinci and Systra. Many of the BBVS team members have previously worked on demanding rail infrastructure projects and so are well prepared to deal with the complexities of OOC. Yet even for the most experienced of them the scale of OOC is remarkable.
BBVS station construction manager Brendan Seymour notes that at OOC “everything – in terms of the site, the number of people and the materials we’re moving – is exponentially larger”. Compared to Crossrail’s Whitechapel station which has three escalators and 11 lifts, OOC will have 44 escalators and 52 lifts.