Business profile
BAM Ritchies has been involved with high profile projects including Crossrail, Scotland’s Borders Rail Project and Hooley Cutting
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mproving and expanding the rail network often involves ground engineering. On our crowded and busy islands, it can be difficult to deal with ground engineering aspects of the infrastructure while minimising the impact on network use, people and nearby structures. Earthworks frequently require ground
engineering but other circumstances do too. Electrification, now proceeding widely on schemes such as EGIP and Great Western, require foundation work and, at times, track lowering based on designs having an appreciation of ground conditions. Determining the nature of the ground involves investigations, often undertaken in awkward locations. As a leading ground investigation contractor, BAM Ritchies uses a wide variety of techniques on electrification and resignalling schemes, and on the surface sections of Crossrail. The company has also undertaken extensive investigation work for Scotland’s new Borders Rail Project.
Correcting the Hooley Cutting A team of BAM Ritchies engineers recently stabilised a key Surrey railway cutting hit by land slips, and the work has been recognised by two Institution of Civil Engineers awards. Victorian railway engineers knew
a thing or two about construction and a small slither of Surrey countryside encompasses all of that knowledge. This team has worked to ensure a 150-year-old railway cutting at Hooley maintains the performance levels those engineers first envisaged.
The village marks a pass into the North
Downs which is also the point that, in the 1840’s, two rival rail companies recognised would be perfect for running their London to Brighton lines. These two railway lines run in parallel and pass through deep cuttings separated by just a few metres of land that forms a central spine between them. Now known as the ‘Slow’ line and the
‘Fast’ or ‘Quarry’ line these cuttings have been plagued by slope failure over recent years - particularly that of the 30-metre deep Slow line, which has seen several trains derailed by land slips. To stabilise the Slow line cutting, a
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team from BAM Ritchies and BAM Nuttall installed soil nails, reprofiled the central spine, installed concrete beam and grillage stabilisation and placed a concrete beam along the crest of one side of the cutting. BAM Ritchies contracts manager
Andrew O’Donovan described the procedure as ‘complicated even on the shallowest of cuttings’. The project team
worked above the live railway on a cutting that theoretically should be a 70 degree slope but is actually vertical in many places and very steep sided.
O’Donavan said: ‘The cliff-like fall of
the cutting isn’t the only reason it has been prone to failure in recent years. The lie of the land between the Forge Lane Bridge to the north and the tunnel which marks
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