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the rail engineer • February 2014
T
he Queen’s New Year’s Honours list recognised David Waboso, capital programmes director for London Underground (LU), with a CBE.
David trained as a civil engineer. After a spell teaching, and then working on transportation schemes in the UK and a water supply programme in Nigeria, he was appointed project manager responsible for delivering the Docklands Light Railway’s signalling system. In 1995, he won the prestigious award of UK ‘Project Manager of the Year’ and then joined the Jubilee Line Extension team where he was instrumental in getting the extension open in time for the Millennium. Following a spell at the Strategic Rail Authority, where he was an executive director, David was appointed LU’s director of engineering in 2005. Since then, he has led the largest upgrade in LU’s history with major improvements already completed, including the installation of new signalling on the Jubilee and Victoria lines and new trains on the Victoria and Metropolitan lines. One of the more recent innovations which David has introduced has been ICE - Innovative Contractor Engagement. This formed the basis of the letting of the contract for the Bank station capacity upgrade project - awarded to Dragados in July 2013. The Rail Engineer visited David in his office recently to find out more about this initiative.
Upsides and downsides Traditionally, such a project would have been carried out using an employer’s design. A consultant would be engaged to come up with the design which would then be built by a contractor.
“That has its plusses and minuses,” commented David. “The plusses are that you can, as an employer, have a design that you are satisfied with, you can have all your wishes and everything in the design and you get a chance to influence the design 100%. Then you go to competitive tender against that design. “The downsides of it are that often you don’t know, as an employer, the tricks of the trade and often contractors come in and say, ‘You know what? I wouldn’t have built it that way.’ That happens increasingly because contractors have become very knowledgeable about design and its interplay with construction - buildability, cost and schedule. They often have their own design people anyway but, using this method, you lose the ability to get the construction contractors to influence your design. “So one of the solutions to that is a design and build contract. That has its plusses and minuses as well. Obviously, what you do as an employer is set out your requirements - I want this building or this station or whatever. You give a high level specification and then you allow the contractor lots of room to innovate within that envelope. “There are variants of that which are around early contractor involvement where we can have a concept design and ask the suppliers to come and tell us what they think, but they’re always quite guarded about that because they say, ‘Why should I tell you my best ideas for somebody else to go and build?’ They often prefer to use their innovation when they are building it.”
Keeping London
NIGEL WORDSWORTH
on ICE