The £16bn Crossrail project has dug out many miles of tunnels beneath London's streets. The company has taken on thousands of unemployed people and even created a special academy to train them - but who wants a job that takes you underground?
"I would do tunnels before I'd do the Shard, because millions of lives are going to be positively affected by what we are doing right now, for the next 120 years."
Linda Miller, 53, originally from Arizona, is project manager at London's Farringdon site for Crossrail.
She once took to the skies as a helicopter pilot for the US military, but these days is adamant that the most interesting jobs in construction are to be found below ground, working on tunnels.
"Transportation infrastructure in particular feels really, really fantastic," she says. "Our work is more hidden, and that gives the people who work on it an even greater sense of meaning and purpose in what they're doing. When you're working hard underground to make new space that doesn't exist, there's a huge pride in that."
Some 12,000 men and women are working on Crossrail over 45 sites, which will pass through 37 train stations and run 73 miles (118km) from Maidenhead and Heathrow in the west, to Shenfield and Abbey Wood in the east.
It is due to be completed by 2018.
One of the women working on the Farringdon site is Leanne Doig, who realised as a teenager that she wanted a manual job after her dad failed to put up shelves in her bedroom.
"I was waiting about six, seven weeks," says the 22-year-old from Canning Town. "Ended up doing them myself. I thought, this is more like it. I liked the hands-on experience."
Little did she know that this fledgling success with her hands would eventually lead her to working in the bowels of the capital on the biggest infrastructure project in Europe, up to 40m deep in places.
Doig is a general operative, so can be asked to turn her hand to anything from digging holes to "working with the chippies" - the carpenters. Currently she is helping to build Farringdon station's ticket hall.
"It's exciting for me. But sometimes it can be scary at the same time, because of all the procedures you'd have to go through if you were injured that far underground."
