21 June and James Melvill told us more of the “Engineering Solutions for Crossrail at Bond Street Station”. James’s degree is from Durban, his Masters from Stellenbosch. He spent 5 years with contractors, and then 5 years with WSP on Bond Street Station, where WSP were overall managers with 7 different contracts to keep in line. A National Monument right next door, twin 260m long platform tunnels, to be bored, piles 30 to 40m deep, construction to within 4m of the crown of the Jubilee Line tunnel below them, ambient-noise-level –5 decibels prescribed, a TBM that couldn’t make a dent in concrete, and a very confined site at ground level…. You start to get the picture? Top-down construction with support walls built under existing slabs (with self-compacting concrete pumped into the base of the wall) and plunge columns (I found the Balfour description better when I looked up that one) among solutions along the way. A client making changes along the way helped, of course! (It helped the client, with property value doubled as a result of the changes). Demob. in September 2012, with all incentives achieved. First trains due in the tunnels this time next year.