With Crossrail workers making their latest tunnelling breakthrough, we thought we’d keep your knowledge of the massive project on track with this factfile.

One of the huge tunnel machines has broken into the eastern end of Liverpool Street Crossrail station - 40 metres under the City of London.

It means workers are now on the final countdown to the big east/west breakthrough at Farringdon, which will link all of Crossrail's tunnels for the first time.

To mark the milestone, we look at Crossrail by numbers with 11 facts and figures about the project you might not know.

  1. The Crossrail route will pass through 40 stations and run more than 100km from Reading and Heathrow in the west, through new twin-bore 21km (13-mile) tunnels below central London to Shenfield and Abbey Wood in the east.
  2. Total funding available to deliver the project is £14.8bn.
  3. Crossrail construction began at Canary Wharf on May 15, 2009. Tunnelling began in May 2012.
  4. Some 40km out of 42km of Crossrail train tunnels are now constructed and the programme is more than 60 per cent complete.
  5. More than 10,000 people are currently working on the project, including 400 apprentices, with the project at peak rate of construction.
  6. Tunnel machines Elizabeth and Victoria each weigh 1,000 tonnes, are 150 metres long and more than seven metres in diameter.
  7. They are the last of eight Crossrail tunnel machines to have carved a route beneath London linking the West End, the City, Canary Wharf and south-east London.
  8. Crossrail will boost the capital's rail capacity by 10 per cent, bringing an additional 1.5 million people within 45 minutes' commute of central London.
  9. Liverpool Street is one of 10 new Crossrail stations being built in central and south-east London.
  10. The first Crossrail services through central London will start in late 2018 - an estimated 200 million annual passengers will use the new scheme.
  11. Some 4.5 million tonnes of excavated material from the tunnels will be shipped to Wallasea Island in Essex where it will be used to create a new 1,500 acre RSPB nature reserve.

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