BIM & PROJECT MANAGEMENT
BIM at New Street
Mace is working as delivery partner with Network Rail for the redevelopment of Birmingham New Street Station. Paul Dalton, senior project manager for Mace, writes on how the £600m project is harnessing BIM.
F
rom our work across the industry, we’ve often found that rail’s uptake of BIM
has largely been in line with other areas of construction: it’s a slow burner that will ultimately completely change the way we build.
The theory is well-established, but as we move from analogue to digital on our building sites, we should be continually asking ourselves how we can use BIM to drive productivity, effi ciency and safety. Design has all too often been the focal point of our ability to create BIM models, while it’s the practical advantages that typically have the most to offer.
Model behaviour
At New Street, we’re delivering a fl agship transformation for the second city’s largest and busiest station. First opened in 1854 and rebuilt in the early 60s, it’s a huge and sprawling site – with 12 platforms serving 32 million passengers a year in the heart of Birmingham. With the redevelopment programme (due to complete in 2015) that capacity will rise to 52 million.
This will include a 10,500m2 concourse and signature atrium as well as a new shopping centre, called Grand Central, with a 23,000m2 John Lewis, all of which will be added to the station as it remains operational throughout.
Limiting disruption for passengers is
paramount. So too is allowing the retail and commercial units to stay as close to ‘business as usual’ as possible – enabling the station to continue to operate, generate revenue and serve
Artists impression of One Grand Central and Birmingham New Street station
its passengers throughout this comprehensive redevelopment.
It’s a complex programme and the fi rst step was to use BIM to map out the original station. That allowed the team to fi rstly understand what there was to work with, and secondly to identify any gaps we had.
It meant we could spot any issues from the original drawings – limited loads or degraded structures – and make sure they were clear from the outset.
With that as a benchmark, BIM has been used from the earliest stages of the project to map out every step of the works – visualising the
sequences, and allowing us to identify issues before they get to site. It includes, for example, all of the temporary works we have. Clearly, they’ll never be part of the fi nal design but they’re crucial to the delivery of the project – and it’s delivery that we’re really using BIM to manage.
Ultimately, it’s become our planning tool. Network Rail has been hugely important in that, and the model is linked to our master programme so that you can pick any date in the programme and the model will show you its status and planned activity. That is hugely important, and provides a shared interface with our client and our supply chain that can be used at planning meetings to highlight with
Continued overleaf > rail technology magazine Jun/Jul 14 | 77
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