TRANSPORT
Linking the city
Manchester Metrolink was the first of the modern tram systems to open, in 1992, and helped kickstart the modern renaissance in light rail. Ridership is growing rapidly and its latest extension, a line to Manchester Airport, is soon to open a year ahead of schedule. PSE’s Adam Hewitt met Metrolink director Peter Cushing to discuss these successes.
“A
truly phenomenal achievement” – the verdict on the work of the Metrolink
engineers and infrastructure workers who have managed to ensure Manchester’s light rail system’s new extension to the airport will open more than a year ahead of schedule.
Cllr Andrew Fender, chair of the Transport for Greater Manchester (TfGM) Committee also said the team and its contractors have become an “ultra-efficient machine”.
The new Airport line will bring the size of the Metrolink network to 92.5km (57.5 miles), serving 92 stops.
Metrolink director Peter Cushing, who took over early last year, told PSE: “Over the last three years, we’ve got better at delivering things. The contractors [the MPT consortium of VolkerRail and Laing O’Rourke with Thales] have all gained more experience and it’s been easier for them. They brought crews off the Oldham-Rochdale extension when they finished that [in March 2014], and off the East Manchester line when they finished that [in October 2013]. They put them onto the Airport extension and have been delivering it in sections, as opposed to just having one team on the Airport line.
“It’s enabled us to get the work done quicker. For the workforce who were on the East Manchester line and were brought over to the Airport line, it’s very similar – with street- running, and road junctions to deal with – so they’ve got the knowledge, they’ve got the experience, and it’s been relatively easy for them to translate from one to the other.”
Finishing those previous extensions early has had beneficial knock-on effects, in other words, allowing quick progress on the Airport extension – which, Cushing said, is “a really
66 | public sector executive Oct/Nov 14
complex piece of work”, with lots of roadwork and co-ordination with Manchester City Council and the highways teams. The work has brought inevitable disruption to road users, but Cushing said they had “tried to make the work as palatable as we can for the people living in the area, though we have to accept that not everyone’s going to be 100% happy”.
The teams delivering the extension work “hand in glove”, Cushing said, and all operate as a single integrated delivery team.
Regeneration and renewal
The airport extension, which branches off the current line between the city centre and Didsbury, via Wythenshawe, is hoped to have major effects on regeneration and in boosting the economy, especially around the new £800m Airport City Manchester industrial and business development.
Cushing said: “If this extension does anything like what we’ve seen with the Oldham town centre extension – if it has anything like that impact – it can only help in regenerating the centre of Wythenshawe, with benefits for everybody concerned.”
Metrolink is also a particularly accessible option for people with mobility issues, who might have previously found it difficult or impossible to make some journeys in the area or into the city centre.
Driver training on the new route is ongoing, with the full opening expected in the next few months, and more new yellow M5000 trams having arrived to serve the line. The fleet for the whole network will total 120 trams, with the modern vehicles, built by Bombardier and Vossloh Kiepe in Germany and Austria, having completely replaced the old white and
turquoise T-68 model.
Sixty new drivers have been recruited, with the total now at more than 300. Eventually, all of them will be training to drive anywhere on the network, giving “total flexibility”, Cushing said. They are trained on a custom-built simulator system, designed to run on desktop computers – far cheaper than a ‘cab simulator’ system.
“We replicate the power handle of the tram with a joystick. It’s all very simple and we can train 10 drivers at a time, with a trainer on a central module who can monitor what they’re doing and give them feedback through headphones. Effectively we’ve bought a simulator package for a fraction of the cost of a traditional simulator, which might cost £1m-plus.”
More frequent trams
A new ‘tram management system’ (TMS) has provided a welcome upgrade to the signalling system used on Metrolink, and has been rolled out across nearly the whole network. It allows more frequent trams, as they can run much closer together and can pull up behind each other where necessary – rather than always having to wait for the tram in front to ‘clear’ a block section of track. The new TMS, being delivered by Thales, also provides real-time passenger information at displays at tram stops.
The TMS had problems in the beginning, and caused delays to the rest of the infrastructure delivery, with issues during its development and installation from 2008-12, and even a court case and independent adjudication over costs between TfGM and Thales.
But that is – mostly – a thing of the past, insists Cushing. “It’s a new signalling system so there are still some teething problems, but nowhere
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