NEWS
Manchester Airport Metrolink extension to open 18 months early
The Manchester Metrolink extension to Wythenshawe and Manchester Airport will launch before the end of this year – nearly 18 months ahead of the original schedule.
The £400m, 14.5km route with 15 new stops, delivered by the MPT consortium of Laing O’Rourke, VolkerRail and Thales UK, is “one of the biggest live civil engineering projects in the country”, including a new viaduct, two major bridges, the Ringway Road dual
carriageway and underpass at Manchester Airport, and 28 new or modernised tram/highway junctions.
MPT project director Bryan Glass said: “A planned and strategic approach, applying the latest methodology such as offsite manufacturing of components,
major allowed us to
make significant savings without compromising safety or quality.”
Cllr Andrew Fender, chair of the
Transport for Greater Manchester Committee, said it was a “truly phenomenal achievement” and credited “several marginal gains adding up to a significant result”, including
the early delivery of
previous extensions allowing resources to be shifted, lessons learnt from those projects, and the creation of a desktop simulator that cut the timescales for driver training in half.
“We’ve become an ultra-efficient machine – and this is our collective
reward,” he said.
The Airport line will bring the size of the Metrolink network to 92.5km (57.5 miles), serving 92 stops.
HS3? Chancellor outlines need for Manchester-Leeds high-speed rail the north of England.
George Osborne says the government is exploring a third high-speed railway to link cities in
Osborne on a visit to Manchester in March 2014
enough. The whole is less than the sum of its parts.
More an ambition than a plan at this early stage, the line would be based on existing routes, upgraded with new tunnels and infrastructure, the chancellor’s team suggests. There is no suggested timescale, nor budget.
Speaking in Manchester on 23 June, the chancellor said: “The cities of the north are individually strong, but collectively not strong
“So the powerhouse of London dominates more and more.
“We need a northern powerhouse too. Not one city, but a collection of northern cities – sufficiently close to each other that combined they can take on the world.
“We need an ambitious plan to make the cities and towns in
this northern belt radically more connected from east to west – to create the equivalent of travelling around a single global city.”
The need for improved east-west connectivity in the north was a key point raised by Sir David Higgins in his HS2 Plus report earlier this year, and Network Rail is also trying to tackle the problem by investing hundreds of millions of pounds in the Northern Hub upgrades.
Big changes to access and possessions will save millions – RDG
The Rail Delivery Group (RDG) has found ways of saving another £1bn from the industry’s running costs by 2019.
A working group has spent 18 months coming up with these suggestions:
• Changing the way
maintenance, renewals and enhancement work is planned and carried out via the Industry Access Programme (potential cross industry benefits: £150m-350m)
• Removing about 700 redundant or problematic switches and crossings (£30m-£40m)
• Increasing ‘time on tools’ during possession windows by reducing handover, set- up and handback time (£60m-140m)
• Better infrastructure projects risk management via collaborative agreements between Network Rail, operators and contractors (£100m-230m)
• Involving operators earlier in the planning of major projects to avoid Network Rail delivering – and therefore spending – more than is needed
• Improved planning and working practices leading to more services for passengers (such as Sunday services at Saturday levels) and therefore more fares revenue for government (£130m-300m)
The Industry Access Programme (IAP), which offers the potentially biggest savings, aims to improve joint working between operators and Network Rail to make the
14 | rail technology magazine Jun/Jul 14
best all-round decisions on maintenance, renewals and enhancements,
instead of it
being seen as a zero-sum-game competition.
There has been a live trial of that idea during which Southeastern extended midweek night access from September – December 2013 on the Tonbridge to Hastings line. Maintenance was done during two seven-hour slots on Mondays and Tuesdays, instead of four-hour slots over four nights in two of the 11 weeks. The trial delivered a 52% increase in maintenance productivity, an 84% reduction in maintenance backlog and 40% savings in maintenance costs.
Pilot projects on the London
South East, LNE & East Midlands and Scotland routes have been used to estimate the benefits for renewals and enhancements,
Robin Gisby, Network Rail’s managing director of network operations, said: “If we are to meet future challenges in providing greater capacity while reducing costs, we know the industry needs to make changes to how it operates.”
The full report, ‘Running a Better Railway: How changes to planning rail improvement work can deliver savings and better services’, is online.
determining the lowest whole industry cost options
© Lynne Cameron & PA Wire
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132 |
Page 133 |
Page 134 |
Page 135 |
Page 136 |
Page 137 |
Page 138 |
Page 139 |
Page 140 |
Page 141 |
Page 142 |
Page 143 |
Page 144 |
Page 145 |
Page 146 |
Page 147 |
Page 148