the rail engineer • February 2014
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A total of 112 lifts were carried out during the possession. More than one thousand workers were inducted throughout the possession and they worked twenty-six thousand hours. Archie expressed his thanks for the invaluable leadership received from his senior contracts manager, Amar Patel, as well as Mark Veness, project manager. Atkins Rail provided the signalling support for the project and a whole host of suppliers added invaluable support to the project. On the Monday 13 January, all the associated stressing and welding was completed and the four lines returned to the planned temporary speed restriction.
A team effort We must not forget Network Rail’s National Delivery Service (NDS) which, with the cooperation of the route controllers, managed to redirect the engineering trains, re-roster their drivers and ensure that all the resources and materials were delivered to site. This must have been a herculean task given the time of year, the extensive flooding and the very tight timescales involved. Steve Featherstone, track programme director for Network Rail, has suggested that this work must be an early candidate for ‘Project of the Year’. It will certainly be hard to beat. It is difficult to imagine a worse set of circumstances for a delivery team to face. Four years in the planning and, if postponed, it would probably take another four years to gain access to do the work again. So the team had to balance the risk of overrunning by four days, and the negative effect that would have on passengers and in the media, against the nightmare of having to
maintain the old and life-expired infrastructure for another four years. Clearly, the expertise available and the confidence of the Balfour Beatty Rail team to deliver, knowing that they had the full support of the command and control centre, was significant. The attention to sound and proven engineering principles, ensuring that the ballast formation was constructed properly without compromising quality, required a significant
(Lead) Kirow crane installing modular S&C. (Below) Excavation and reballasting taking place. (Bottom) Only a few S&C units are left to lay-in out of the total of 112.
amount of professional expertise. The result is a credit to those involved and will be appreciated by those who inherit and maintain this element of the infrastructure in future years.