Crossrail Station Abbey Wood, London, United Kingdom

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CP 001108 | Crossrail Station Abbey Wood, London

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Animation of Crossrail Station Abbey Wood (© Fereday Pollard Architects Ltd.)

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Interior View of Timber Roof Structure of Crossrail Station Abbey Wood (© www.chrismansfieldphotos.com)

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27 February 2018

001108

With the Crossrail railroad line in Great Britain, one of the biggest infrastructure projects of Europe is in progress. The construction costs for the 73-mile railroad line amount to about €21 billion. It runs from Reading in Berkshire in the west to Shenfield in Essex in the east, crossing through the center of London.A branch line runs under the Thames to Woolwich and ends at the recently completed Abbey Wood Station. Its extraordinary timber roof construction has the shape of a huge manta ray which seems to hover above the station.

Client	Crossrail Limited, UK www.crossrail.co.uk Network Rail Limited, UK www.networkrail.co.uk
Architect	Fereday Pollard Architects Ltd., UK www.feredaypollard.com
Structural Analysis Timber Construction	enartec - engineering + architecture, Italy www.enartec.it
Timber Construction Prefabrication, Work Planning, and Assembly	WIEHAG Holding AG, Austria www.wiehag.com

Model

Model | Timber Roof Structure

Two Dlubal customers have been involved in the project. WIEHAG Holding AG planned, produced, and assembled the timber structure; the engineers of enartec – engineering + architecture performed the structural analysis for the roof structure in RFEM.

Structure

The roof, made of larch and spruce glulam timber with dimensions of 164 ft x 181 ft, has a total area of 17,222 ft². Four single-curved primary supporting bars made of glulam timber form the basis of the roof structure. They were designed as articulated beams and each beam has a total length of 148 ft.

Single and double-curved secondary beams are connected to the primary beams with a center distance of 6.6 ft. 18 straight or single‑curved tertiary supporting bars are included as well. Three‑layered plates made of natural larch and spruce wood are used to build the roof supporting structure.

The roof is supported by columns and beams made of steel. The bracings and the edge beams of the roof are made of steel as well. A total of 33 tons of steel were used.

Once the Crossrail railroad line is completed in 2019 as planned, the free-form roof structure of the Abbey Wood Station will certainly be one of the architectural highlights of this major project.