Rail Industry Focus

Points renewal programme revised at Wimbledon

Work has started on a £7m project to rebuild a crucial railway junction in Wimbledon. Shaun Hodges, Network Rail’s Wessex S&C project manager, discusses the successful early progress and revisions.

The South West Trains-Network Rail Alliance has started work on a £7m programme of track maintenance in the Wimbledon area, designed to improve the reliability and punctuality of trains on this part of the network.

More than 72 South West Trains services per hour pass through Wimbledon at peak times and, as a result, the state of the railway around the station has a critical impact on punctuality across the network. But some of the infrastructure in the area dates back to the 1970s.

Preparatory work for the £7m project – which was 14 months in the making – started in October, finishing with a two-day Christmas closure allowing the team to clear the site ready for work in the new year.

Shaun Hodges, Network Rail’s Wessex S&C project manager, told us that during the Christmas closure there was a great deal of signalling preparation with new location cases, new plug interface location boxes and new cables being run. In addition to this, point motors were laid out ready for the work to begin and the team set the site compound up.

Successful crossover installation

Once this work was complete, the engineering team was ready to take possession of the area west of Wimbledon station where they would begin replacing 12 sets of points.

“The core renewals started on the weekend of 3-4 January, and that is when we broke the track and put the first new crossover in,” said Hodges. “We put a long crossover in place at the west end of the station – point number 756 A/B.

“It all went according to plan, 100% exactly how we wanted it to go and we handed back about half-an-hour early.”

The project, being carried out by Network Rail and contractor Colas Rail, is taking place over six weekends from 3-4 January through to mid-February. But during the weekend possessions, South West Trains cannot call at, or run through, Wimbledon.

Thameslink services, however, will continue to run to Wimbledon from central London via Tooting during the affected weekends, but there will be no services from Wimbledon to Sutton via St Helier.

Asked how the team managed to ensure the initial works ran so smoothly, Hodges said: “We had operational contingencies agreed with the train operators, so we had a detailed plan of every service that could have been affected in the event of an over-run. We also had a mitigation plan in place and a huge bus plan, bigger than any I’ve developed before with my colleagues at South West Trains. We also had construction contingencies throughout the entire weekend to hand it back on time.”

Hodges, who worked on last year’s Southampton S&C renewals project, which included replacing 24 point ends with conventional back drives, added that ‘micro-managing’ was also essential.

“Most of the lessons I learnt from that project, I transferred into Wimbledon,” he said, “which included lots of micro-planning and not leaving anything to chance.

“We looked at everything that could’ve gone wrong. For instance, we had a mitigation plan right down to getting 24-hour chefs in hotels for people who were going back at various times of the day and night.”

Revised programme

Originally the Wimbledon renewals team was tasked with replacing 12 sets of points over the allocated six weekends, but that has now been revised due to ‘restrictions’ being put in place.

Hodges said: “It was going to be 12 units, but it is now going to be eight with a revised plan. We have had some restrictions put on us, for a number of reasons. Initially, we will be doing eight of the 12 points and the other four, hopefully, will be done later in 2015. But this is not dated at the moment.”

Asked what the restrictions were and why they had been imposed, Hodges could not comment.

However, Network Rail recently came under the spotlight after engineering over-runs at King’s Cross and Paddington during the Christmas period left thousands of commuters stranded, and the rail operator facing a potential multi-million pound fine.

Following the problems, Network Rail’s CEO Mark Carne said that the events highlighted the “unacceptable impact on the travelling public when plans go wrong”.

He has also proposed that there should “a broader, industry-wide review, into the timing of our major works programmes” and the “passenger contingency arrangements for such works”.

Next project phase

Hodges told us that work on the revised project will see the engineering team adding “another crossover each weekend for the next three weekends” finishing off with a “very long stressing, tamping and welding week in early February”.

“Then we have a series of about 50-60 midweek nights to finish off all the other stressing and welding and completing the job,” he said.

“At this point we will go under the radar and most people won’t know we’re there because we will be operating in the ‘white period’ between the last train at night and the first train in the morning.”

With regards to the welding works, Hodges noted that the team has approximately 320 welds to put in – as well as having time to stress the layout – before the hot weather arrives. “We want to get that done by the end of March,” he said.

RTM asked why a date had not yet been set for the remaining renewals, Hodges said: “The Wessex programme this year (calendar as opposed to financial) is the busiest that I can remember, and I’ve been doing this 25 years.

“I can’t remember a more intensive S&C renewal programme for Wessex.”

Despite the revision, and once the renewals programme is complete, the team is confident that it will boost reliability and punctuality for passengers travelling through Wimbledon and from many other stations and locations.

“Currently there are a number of quality issues and points failures in the area, all of which will be dealt with under the cover of the track renewal,” said Hodges. “I’m also hopeful that with a fully welded layout our lineside neighbours will notice some benefit in terms of noise pollution, as we’ll be taking out a number of joists, being reduced.”

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