CIVILS, CONSTRUCTION & STATIONS
Safety first at Paddington Station
Natalie Binder, marketing and communications manager at Leica Geosystems Ltd, based in Milton Keynes, discusses the Paddington project.
P
addington station – famous worldwide not only for its creator Isambard Kingdom
Brunel but also for a small marmalade-loving bear. An average of 26,500 passengers travel from Paddington station every day. Despite its Victorian elegance and regality, plans were developed to build a brand new underground station directly beneath the historic landmark. This infrastructure project has been undertaken by Crossrail and forms part of Europe’s largest construction project. The new station will be known as the Crossrail Paddington station.
Since July 2011, plans have been developed by Crossrail to complete a new underground network for London. In August 2011, working as a joint venture on behalf of Crossrail Ltd, Costain-Skanska
was awarded Crossrail
Contract 405 as part of the complex £14.8bn rail project. This project is creating a major new railway line, stretching 118km from Reading and Heathrow and the west of London to Abbey Wood in the east. It will also pass directly underneath central London.
The
new network will now connect seven brand new mainline underground stations, all of which are important interchanges between existing Network Rail services and the London Underground. One of these new stations is the Crossrail Paddington station.
Meticulous planning to monitor structures above and below
Working directly under the very heart of 40 | rail technology magazine Aug/Sep 14
London has many challenges. The city is home to over eight million people and its Underground handles a billion journeys per year. The new Crossrail station at Paddington is surrounded not only by modern buildings but by historic ones as well. It is also located in the densely built-up zone of central London with its maze of pipes, cables and sewers, making it an extremely complicated construction project.
Since London is considered a global city, it had to work without disruption, even for a project of this magnitude. Therefore, the Crossrail station is being built as a four-storey top-down construction, with two-way live traffic above ground as excavation carries on below.
With all this digging, loosened dirt in central London could settle unevenly and potentially cause structures to tilt, or severe cracking could develop. Constant monitoring of buildings in this area was vital to avoid possible damage. This is how Leica Geosystems products and solutions play an important role in securing the success of this new railway line by monitoring structures and the degree of earth settlement.
Robotic total stations observing Paddington 24/7
Costain-Skanska decided to implement real-time monitoring solutions by using 52 Leica TM30 ‘total stations’, and over 1,800 monitoring prisms of all types in and around the Paddington area. The equipment was
attached to various key positions on the outside of buildings. Highly accurate 3D data is collected from the ‘total stations’ that measure key reference points of the various prisms placed strategically throughout the area’s buildings. These measurements, roughly 8,500 points a day, are made in daily cycles. At the recent phase of the project – which was called the ‘bulk dig’ – the data capture for the majority of the area’s total stations takes place at six hour intervals each day, after which the data is sent to be processed with Leica GeoMoS. The results are provided on the web portal before it is distributed to the construction team.
The use of the Leica Geosystems monitoring sensors, software and communications is vital to the Crossrail project, as these accurate measurements provide information on any variations
in structures caused by earth
movement. This minimises risks, not only to the buildings themselves, but also to public safety.
Automated data processing in near real- time
Such projects require constant observation, repetitively measuring the same routes and reference points several times daily throughout the entire project’s life span. By using robotic total stations, such activities can be done automatically and data is directly transferred for processing using Leica GeoMoS, GeoMoS Adjust and GeoOffice software.
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