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the rail engineer • February 2014
Earls Court
CHRIS PARKER
Christmas closure keeps London moving
E
arls Court is a crucial link in the London Underground (LUL) rail network, unlocking the way to the whole western section of the District Line, as well as being an important station in its own right. The track has been in a poor state for years and, in order to ensure safety and some sort of reliability, there have been far more maintenance interventions than should normally be necessary for such infrastructure as is present here. This maintenance has meant both excess costs and undesirable disruption to services as the works have been undertaken. LUL has, understandably, been considering how best to rectify this situation for the long term through track renewal works. The issue has been not what to do but how to programme it for the best possible balance between efficiency, effectiveness and convenience for the customer. In parallel with the consideration of this particular project, the organisation has also been undertaking a strategic review of the way it does track renewals. The routine has been the use of weekend line closures, something not universally popular with the travelling public! So, in moving away from this approach, LUL aims to minimise the impact on passengers through developing methods to renew during normal closure periods at night but, when suitable, to utilise major blockades to ‘blitz’ large amounts of work. This was the case for Earls Court as described by John Hardy, LUL head of track renewals, and his colleagues in the Track Partnership (a collaboration between LUL and Balfour Beatty Rail), Steve Naybour, business improvement manager and Ram Ramburn, project manager.
Three out of four The overall works required at Earls Court consisted of renewal of the four platform lines and of the points at the west end of the station. This was too much to be undertaken in one session, even if the ‘major blockade’ approach was to be used. It was decided to split the works into two and to tackle the ‘easier’ part first, this being the majority of the plain line relaying. The layout of the station, which has four platforms, meant that only three of the four lines could be relaid in one blockade so as to leave the fourth available for the large number of engineering trains that would be needed to bring in materials and remove spoil, 90% of which would be recycled. Christmas week is the quietest week on the LUL system, and Christmas Day is the only day of the year when the whole network shuts down. It was therefore determined that, despite the fact that Chelsea FC were due to play at home on Boxing Day and again on 29 December, this was the week to plan for. In the end the plan for 2013 was to renew the plain line of Platforms 1, 2 and 4, which vary in
length up to 220m. This would mean renewing the decks of two subways that pass beneath Platform 2 and two sections of slab track (one in Platform 1 and the other in Platform 2) as well as the plain track. The intention is to renew the fourth line (Platform 3) and the west end pointwork in a similar blockade at Christmas 2014. Lessons learned from the ‘simpler’ 2013 works will assist in seeing through these more complex tasks.
Christmas morning “Delivering a multi discipline project in the tight confines of Earls Court which was kept open for service was a mammoth challenge,” Ram Ramburn explained. The 2013 works started early on Christmas Day, probably before even the most excited children opened their Christmas stockings. Six days of intensive work followed, interrupted by the Chelsea matches, and resulting in the handing back of the new track and structures on time at the start of traffic on New Year’s Eve. The platform lines renewed had never been relaid in living memory, so there was a mass of heavily contaminated spoil to be removed. Indeed, this amounted to about 2,200 tonnes to be shifted by train from the site. 28 engineer’s trains were required to remove this burden or to bring in the new materials for the project. The complications of combining the track, slab and subway renewals in one blockade were added to by the problems of drainage