As Europe’s largest infrastructure project speeds closer to its scheduled finish date of later this year, the pressure is building to make sure everything is on time and on budget. Just above the hundreds of workers underground at each station are thousands of potential future rail users who are growing increasingly curious about what December 2018 holds.

To answer some of the questions the general public may have about the ten-year project, Infrastructure Intelligence was taken underground at Farringdon and given a glimpse into the future. It is one of the ten stations that has been built from scratch and is a central component of the line.

Now in its final stages, the central reason for the major project is an urgent need to help a capital city which is desperate for an increase in capacity. Once completed, Crossrail is set to boost central London’s rail capacity by 10%. Transport for London (TfL) says the line will also help it keep pace with London’s growing population set to rise from 8.6 million today to around 10 million by 2030.

Farringdon as a central point of the network will have 140 trains passing through every hour as it expects to welcome as many as 155,000 passengers through its doors every day. Each train passing into the station will measure in it at over 200m in length, will equate to the size of two football pitches and will have space for 1,500 passengers in nine carriages. At over 200m in length, they are over one and a half times longer than the longest tube train.

From one end to the other, the station is 350m in length. The Crossrail network itself is more than 100km long, running from Reading and Heathrow Airport in the west to Shenfield and Abbey Wood in the east. It will run underneath central London through new tunnels and using existing lines on the Great Eastern and Great Western Main Lines.

The station’s site manager Andy Scholes started the tour of Farringdon and one of the first impressive sights the public will encounter is a 360-tonne reinforced concrete structure which will form a diamond ceiling at one of the ticket halls. The construction represents the diamond quarter of London that is unique to London and the station. The new ticket hall currently being constructed at Cowcross Street will connect with the Thameslink ticket hall and has been designed to be able to accommodate and manage the increased capacity caused by Crossrail services.

Stepping onto the platforms below is where you really start to see the majority of contractors working away down the 250m long stretches -which are around twice the length of your average London Underground tube station platform. Stations are due to handed over to TfL in July but Scholes believes there isn’t any standout reason why that won’t happen.

“The pressures of the completion date is what it is, we just have to grind it out,” he added. That’s something I say often with many aspects of the project as essentially that’s what the majority of us have to do at this late stage. We have hit so many milestones now that there is no reason why this station cannot be complete in time. Everything is in place, it’s just a case of making sure it all comes together and is handed over to TfL to play around with. Effectively it’s a new toy for them and they need to come in make sure they know how everything operates and where to go if anything should go wrong.”

Moving down to track level is when someone can really appreciate the scale of the project and how much work has gone into creating the central network of Crossrail, essentially from scratch. In order to build the Elizabeth Line, eight tunnel-boring machines have excavated around 26 miles of concrete under the streets of central London. The west to east breakthrough which happened in 2015 is highlighted by Farringdon’s site manager as one of the major milestones since first coming on site in 2010.

Carving out tunnels under central London’s complex underground can be pin-pointed as the crucial element of ensuring the network came to fruition. The TBMs, named Ada and Phyllis, first embarked in November 2012 with the latter tunnelling four miles from Royal Oak Portal to Farringdon. A TBM was then moved 30m east of the west branch and buried underground. The process was 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with a rolling crew of 15 swapping shifts every 12 hours and ultimately finished in 2015 when the breakthrough was made.

The tunnelling now seems a long time ago and all efforts are currently focused on not going over time or budget. Contractors continue to press ahead with work around 40m below ground as the completion date of December approaches and the final elements are now concerned with ensuring the escalators are fitted and platforms are tiled. The project itself is now said to be 90% complete and despite reported delays at Whitechapel and Woolwich, Scholes says Farringdon is on target for late 2018.

He added: “Here at Farringdon, we are okay in where we would want to be. Could we be a bit further ahead? Yes, but at the same time it could certainly be a lot worse. It’s an extremely complicated project and we have just ‘tickled’ a railway running through the heart of central London and created brand new stations. It was never going to run smoothly from start to finish. If you look at the problems that have been caused then there hasn’t been too much disruption. There might have been a little congestion but if you’re going to be building something of this size from scratch then of course there will be one or two issues.”

The Farringdon manager insists when complete that Crossrail is going to be “absolutely fantastic” for the city. It is estimated to bring an extra 1.5m people within 45 minutes of central London, thereby providing the public with another vital link to London’s key employment, leisure and business districts, including Heathrow, the West End, the City and Docklands. It’s this reason why Scholes believes the project is so important to the capital.

"We have hit so many milestones now that there is no reason why this station cannot be complete in time. Everything is in place, it's just a case of making sure it all comes together."

Farringdon site manager Andy Scholes

He said: “When you add 10% capacity in one fell swoop then you really help relieve congestion on the Central line which we know can be horrendous at the worst of times. The line will open up the city to people who would not have access before or wouldn’t have come in. It’s a high-frequency service and from Farringdon you can basically get to three airports which essentially opens up the planet.”

The next big challenge at the central station is turning the power on with teams continuing to work with a limited amount of temporary power. But first project leaders have to ensure all the cladding is installed, temporary ventilation is removed and all systems are functioning.

As we head towards the bright light of outside following the 90-minute tour, Scholes provides one final reflection of where the station’s current progression lies. While conceding that construction could be further ahead, the boss insists that things could be a lot worse and further behind. Scholes remains confident of remaining on time.

“We are doing okay,” Scholes said. “Would we like to be further ahead? Yes. Are we still good to handover to TfL in July? Yes. Are there challenges? Yes. It’s just little things that have come out of the woodwork that have been hard to plan for that have delayed us sometimes.

“It’s only very recently that we have got to the point where we know for definite that we have a path in place to open in time. Before we have always just assumed it, but now is the time to be delivering it and making sure we are talking to the London Underground, TfL and Rail for London to make sure we’re all on the same page and we know how stuff is going to be delivered.”