More than £70 million has been saved thanks to smart methods being used to build a railway flyover. As part of the East West Rail project, teams had to replace a flyover crossing the line at Bletchley. Instead of replacing old columns one by one, engineers instead opted to create a tunnel-like box structure for trains below to pass through – and for the bridge to sit upon. This means the track, one of the busiest of its type in Europe, doesn’t have to be shut, protected as it is by this new structure.
Mark Cuzner, East West Rail Alliance project director, said: “By working smarter we’ve been able to speed-up the project by around six months. At the start of the project, we built a protective wall next to the West Coast main line so we could safely build the box structure during the day when the railway is open, instead of working piecemeal at night-time when the railway is closed.
“Most of the components for both the box structure, and the flyover, arrived pre-built and were simply assembled on site, like a model kit or set of Duplo bricks. The simplicity of construction meant we could safely reduce the workforce onsite by 60%, cut the previously-forecast cost by £70m and get the job done six months quicker than planned.”
E-W Rail was originally designed with refurbishment of this flyover in the plan. After all, it was “only” 60 years old with comparatively little use. An old colleague of mine who was seconded to E-W Rail for a while was horrified. His civil engineering experience was that refurbishment always costs a lot more than anyone expected and on investigation all sorts of unexpected things would be discovered. And so it proved, and without going into detail that I don’t fully understand, the problems were caused mainly by long ignored water ingress. The cost of correcting these issues and the possibility of carrying on work without disturbing the very busy West Coast main line led to this – a better, cheaper job.