Interviews

Delivering the North Doncaster Chord

Adrian Elliott, Alliance manager on the North Doncaster Chord at Network Rail, talked to RTM about delivering the new railway flyover.

On 26 June, transport secretary Patrick McLoughlin officially cut the ribbon and opened the North Doncaster Chord, a £45m flyover at Shaftholme that will help pave the way for additional passenger trains by removing slow-moving freight services from the East Coast Main Line (ECML).

It is expected that the Chord will carry around 30 freight services over the ECML every day, cutting the time taken to transport coal between the Humber ports and the Aire Valley power stations by up to 30 minutes.

As well as tackling a crucial bottleneck on the line, this project was part of Network Rail’s vision for freight to will allow many of the increasing numbers of freight containers coming into Britain’s ports to be transported by rail.

McLoughlin said: “The North Doncaster Chord will help in freeing up space for much-needed additional passenger services between Yorkshire and London and reduce delays, while also improving the vital freight network across the region.”

Chord challenges

Discussing the project with RTM, Adrian Elliott, Alliance manager on the North Doncaster Chord at Network Rail, stated that it has been an amazing achievement to deliver the project in a short turnaround time.

He said that the project was slightly hindered by the amount of time it took to receive the Development Consent Order, which did not come until October 2012.

In fact, by the stage the permission was granted, an alliance had already been formed between Network Rail and the appointed contractor Morgan Sindall.

Soon after, though, the partners were on site. Elliott said: “We started the programme with site establishment in January 2013, putting haul roads in and going across fields in the early quarter of 2013, which is never the best time to do that work, especially as they were heavily waterlogged. This slowed our progress down.

“There were clearly challenges along the way, as there is with any major construction project. Probably the biggest challenge was the actual timescales of the construction period. We always had a tight timescale.”

Things got even harder in February 2013, with the massive landslip at Hatfield Colliery, which effectively cut the Skellow line off until July. This significantly cut the train-hauled importation of spoil. But the team made up a lot of lost time using road transport, approaching from the west side, to serve the section between the viaduct and Bell Croft Lane bridge.

URS finalised the overall project design, but there were concerns that the piles for the viaduct would have to be rotary bored, rather than CFA piling. “Fortunately we managed to overcome this with the designers and piling contractor, Bachy Soletanche. When the piling started we managed to complete the work quite quickly.”

Level crossing

Located 100m north of the new viaduct, the alliance replaced the Joan Croft level crossing with a new road bridge. Elliott said: “Closing the level crossing enabled us to lower the overhead lines on the ECML. That allowed us to lower the embankment and, therefore, lower the viaduct.

“But in doing that it gave us a number of critical path activities to get the highway bridge open, so we could lower the overhead lines, which then allowed us to get the main span over the main line in place.”

The limited availability of the crane to work on the flyover caused a critical path for the project.

“We could only get the crane for the August bank holiday – so everything was pinned on getting the highway bridge open so we could drop the main span in.

“Should we have missed that, we would have been looking at something like a two-month delay. However, through long shifts and a collaborative effort, the team delivered the necessities in order to allow the viaduct to be put into place.

Elliott told RTM that one of the main reasons the project was delivered on time, despite the challenges it faced was through collaborative working.

He said: “The premise behind the alliance was co-location, which worked very well, because it gave us immediate access to decisions or questions and queries. When we moved to a Network Rail and Morgan Sindall co-located site, we were also keen to make sure the sub-contractors were co-located with us and not to have satellite offices.

“We had an open plan office with VolkerRail’s track team, Brenbuild our concrete contractor and Jakto who did the earthworks – we were all in the office. It worked very well and worked on the principle of employing the best man for the job.”

Following the final weekend of commissioning in May 2014, Freightliner Heavy Haul Ltd became the first freight operator to use the new Doncaster North Chord for commercial use, on 1 June, when its Immingham to Ferrybridge train used it at around 1pm.

When that happened, Elliott said: “It filled me with a massive sense of pride. We all worked together as a team and managed to do something quite innovative.”