4 | the rail engineer | august 2012
IN BRIEF New innovation team The RSSB is putting together an innovation team to fund demonstration projects to test new technologies and business approaches. The team will manage an innovation fund, with initial pilot funding from the Department for Transport of £16 million. Network Rail director of engineering, Steve Yianni said: “The rate at which the rail industry innovates and adopts new ideas and technologies was identified as one of the barriers to improved customer satisfaction and reduced costs in the Rail Value for Money report. Helping transform ideas and technologies from research into full commercially available applications is what the railway needs.”
news
CROSSRAIL
Crossrail reaches Paddington
Virgin out West Coast Main Line operator Virgin Trains has lost its franchise. Instead, the DfT preferred the bid by FirstGroup who will take over the route on 9 December until 31 March 2026.
Virgin, which was outbid on the ECML franchise by both GNER and National Express, who then failed to make the higher payments back to Government, was understandably annoyed. Sir Richard Branson commented: “We have made realistic offers for the East Coast twice before which were rejected by the Department for Transport for completely unrealistic ones... Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. When will the Department for Transport learn?” Has the rail industry seen the last of one of its most colourful characters?
Crossrail’s first tunnel boring machine (TBM), Phyllis, has successfully reached Paddington, having travelled 750 metres from Royal Oak, in west London. A second TBM, Ada, has now broken ground at the Royal Oak Portal and commenced tunnelling towards Paddington. Nearly 4,000 concrete segments have been used to construct the western tunnels so far. These are manufactured at a dedicated plant
at Old Oak Common which has already produced 12,000 segments. As more TBMs come online, demand for these segments will increase. Eventually, a total of eight tunnel boring machines will be used to construct 21 kilometres (13 miles) of Crossrail’s twin bore tunnels running between Royal Oak in the west and Pudding Mill Lane and Plumstead in east London. Two kilometres of 900mm narrow
ROLLING STOCK
Cross-channel rush
Freight is up again Despite the recent improvements in Britain’s summer weather, the soggy ground continues to slip either onto the tracks or away from underneath it. The WCML was closed between Motherwell and Glasgow on 22 August. A week earlier, and a brick retaining wall on the line between Cardiff Central and Cardiff Queen Street stations collapsed, closing several lines. Two weeks before that, and the railway was closed between Lincoln and Gainsborough due to an earth bank sliding onto the track. Network Rail maintenance teams continue to reopen lines quickly, but they are struggling to cope with one of the wettest summers on record.
gauge tunnel railway has also been laid from Westbourne Park to enable tunnel locomotives to transport materials and supplies into and out of the tunnel. Excavated material is taken by train from Westbourne Park to Northfleet in Kent, from where it will be shipped to Wallasea Island in Essex to create a RSPB nature reserve. A total of 66,000 tonnes of excavated material has been transported to Northfleet so far.
It wasn’t just the UK rail network that was busy during the Olympic period. Le Shuttle, the car carrying trains run by Eurotunnel through the Channel Tunnel, achieved a new record for traffic. In the seven days up to 12 August, 74,292 vehicles and 776 coaches travelled (in both directions) between Folkestone,
Kent, and Coquelles, Pas-de-Calais. This is the heaviest traffic ever seen in one week, since the end of Duty Free sales in 1999. To achieve this, 838 Shuttle departures were needed, at a rate of five per hour, the equivalent to one departure every twelve minutes. At the same time, a new daily record
was also achieved, with 15,152 vehicles travelling across the Channel on Saturday 11th August in both directions. This was made possible by the bringing back into service of a halflength train of passenger coaches which had been mothballed back in 2004. Part of a project started last year, the remaining half will be back in service in a few months time. In case a fault should cause a delay to the critical five trains per hour schedule, a sixth train was on standby at all times ready to replace any defective unit. Timetabling the shuttles into the rest of the tunnel traffic was made easier by also increasing the speed of passenger shuttles from 140 to 160 km/hr - the same speed as Eurostar trains. There is a project underway to achieve a similar speed increase on freight shuttles, but that is technically more complicated as it entails increasing locomotive power from 5 to 7MW and lightening the 32 vehicle-carrying wagons which make up each train.