London Crossrail Project Monitored by 105 Total-stations

ESS Safeforce has placed this large order for Topcon MS05AX Total Stations. The order for 105 instruments is also believed to be the single largest order globally for 0.5" total stations from any manufacturer. The order follows the award of the Crossrail C510 contract to ESS customer Morgan Sindall, part of the BBMV partnership.

Gary Ridsdale - survey products business development manager at ESS Safeforce commented, "It is great news for us to supply such a significant quantity of instruments in what is the biggest civil engineering project in Europe at the moment."

Crossrail will run 118km from Maidenhead and Heathrow in the west, through new twin-bore 21km tunnels under central London to Shenfield and Abbey Wood in the east. It will bring an additional 1.5 million people within 45 minutes commuting distance of London's key business districts. Work on the Crossrail project started in 2009 and Crossrail services will begin operation in 2018.

Having conducted extensive field testing of available instruments from all manufacturers, Morgan Sindall concluded that the MS05AX was by far the best sensor for the monitoring project.

Alastair Cruickshank, engineering survey manager at Morgan Sindall commented, "The instrument always locks on to the correct prism whilst monitoring the buildings and tunnels of London, even as there are often several prisms in the field of view of the instrument particularly in the challenging linear tunnel environments. The Matrix Detection function facilitates us to install new monitoring prisms and the instrument finds them automatically."

Ian Stilgoe Topcon's european geomatics business manager said "We would like to thank Morgan Sindall for this significant order which will provide a level of protection on the latest London rail project as yet not seen. From experience on previous long term projects, the reliability of the Topcon MS05AX has proved unprecedented".