WORKSHOPS, DEPOTS AND MANUFACTURING
The factory The new facility,
control high. So it has a huge stockyard able to accommodate 90,000
manufactured located on the former
Woodyard site near Ten Pound Walk in Doncaster, will employ around 45 people. Its general manager, Peter Heubeck, said the site clearance and construction cost around £6.5m, plus another £6m for the manufacturing equipment inside.
J F Finnegan of Sheffield was the design and build contractor on behalf of Trackwork Moll (itself building the factory on behalf of Network Rail); Race Cottam Associates of Sheffield were project architects and the Doncaster office of Hannah Reed were the consulting civil engineers.
Heubeck told RTM that tests are still ongoing but the factory is now “almost” at the point of making perfect test sleepers. But it’s a long process, because the test sleepers need to attain their 28-day strength after casting, and then one of the tests – the cyclic loading test to simulate many thousands of passages of trains over a sleeper – takes a further three weeks.
Network Rail’s original announcements suggested the factory would be delivering sleepers for the network by spring 2013, but it won’t actually be until February 2014.
David Millar, projects manager in Network Rail NDS’s Enhancements team, told RTM: “Planning and getting the contracts agreed took longer than expected and, now that the construction is complete, the works to make sure that the sleepers are perfect is taking a little longer than expected. The factory is producing sleepers but is still a short time away from receiving product acceptance.”
Although the basic production method is tried- and-tested, the new factory automates many more processes to make it more efficient – meaning lower sleeper prices for Network Rail. There’s also been “real technical improvement” in two areas, Heubeck said – more accurate measuring of the tension load on each individual steel strand through the sleepers (there are six or eight tensioned strands depending on the sleeper type), and the new 3D measuring equipment in the factory’s own lab.
McLoughlin was shown how this equipment works, and Heubeck called it “so much more accurate than previous ways of doing it…it’s a real step forward.”
Steady-state production
Although Network Rail has suggested it will want every sleeper produced by the factory (about 400,000 a year), demand is certain to fluctuate. But the factory needs to maintain steady-state manufacturing to keep quality
sleepers to act as a ‘buffer’ between constant, predictable production and fluctuating real- world demand.
Heubeck said: “Although we can make just under 1,400 sleepers a day, our peak dispatch rate is probably three times that. We’ve got a massive gantry crane out in the stockyard, so not only are the sleepers cheaper, but distribution is easier and there’s very quick loading of wagons.”
He made the point that during the West Coast route modernisation in the mid-2000s, there were constraints on sleeper supplies, forcing Network Rail to spend a lot of money remotely stocking new sleepers next to where work was being done because sleepers couldn’t be dispatched quickly enough.
“With the dispatch rate we’ve got from this site, that should never be needed again,” he told us. The factory is working on an 11 days per fortnight production schedule.
Efficient handling
The factory also acts as a distribution hub, so the intention is that the sleepers will not need to be handled elsewhere between production and installation – with proper planning and logistics, they will be transferred directly to work sites.
In the case of the high output factory trains, their sleeper wagons will come directly to the factory and load up, and unload used sleepers. Used sleepers returned to Doncaster facility will remain Network Rail’s property, but Trackwork Moll will act as a kind of handling agent.
Some old sleepers will be sold on to farmers and the construction industry, others will be crushed at Network Rail’s own track materials recycling facility in Cambridgeshire, and roughly one in five will be able to be re-used elsewhere on the network.
Heubeck said the advantages for the high output operation of a quick turnaround in terms of loading and unloading sleepers outweighed any inefficiencies inherent in this double-handling of used sleepers.
Competing with Cemex
The factory’s sole client is Network Rail National Delivery Service (NDS). Heubeck joked: “The likelihood is that every sleeper we make, Network Rail will take – it’s a manufacturer’s dream come true!”
Since the closure of Tarmac’s factory, the only other place where
Continued overleaf > rail technology magazine Dec/Jan 14 | 71
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