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Thursday 1 Oct 2015

Making tracks at Norton Bridge

Region & Route:

| North West & Central

New railway track is being laid at Norton Bridge using a specialist machine in the latest stage of Network Rail’s £250m Stafford area improvement work.

A new section of railway line and eleven new bridges are being built to create a flyover at Norton Bridge and remove a bottleneck on the existing network. The work will improve performance and reliability and deliver the capability to run more passenger and freight trains.

Ten kilometres of new track will be laid in total from the new siding created at Little Bridgeford. The High Output New Track Construction (NTC) machine, which has laid the new railway, can lay up to 180 metres of track per hour and is up to 50 per cent quicker than conventional track laying methods.

It works by transporting new sleepers from trailing wagons and places them onto the conveyor system which moves them to the head of the train before they are placed on to the track bed. The sleepers are then aligned to the correct spacing automatically and new rail is run through a series of rollers/clamps and clipped onto them. 

Staffordshire Alliance manager, Matt Clark, said: “It’s great to see the track going in and the site really taking shape after all the hard work that has taken place.

“We’re making great progress at Norton Bridge and it’s satisfying to know our work, as part of Network Rail's wider Railway Upgrade Plan, will deliver greater performance and reliability for passengers and the capability to run more train services.”

Earth has been excavated from a cutting (14 metres at its deepest) for the new line and this is being used to create embankments and bunds to protect wildlife elsewhere within the site. Around one million tonnes of earth has been moved.

Network Rail is delivering £250m of investment in the Stafford Area Improvements Programme. Line-speed improvements were delivered between Stafford and Crewe ahead of schedule in 2014 and the re-signalling of Stafford was completed on time over the August bank holiday.

The final phase of the programme is the new rail over rail flyover at Norton Bridge which will be completed for Easter 2016. The NTC machine returns to Norton Bridge in November and December for further track-laying work.

The work is being delivered by the Staffordshire Alliance - a partnership of Atkins, Laing O’Rourke, Network Rail and VolkerRail.

ENDS

Notes to editors:

Stafford Area Improvements Programme

With unprecedented levels of passenger and freight growth on the rail network and the West Coast main line full to capacity within the next five years, the Staffordshire Area Improvements Programme seeks to remove a major bottleneck through the Stafford area. Once complete, the £250m programme will facilitate the introduction of new timetables between 2015 and 2017 and deliver the capability to run more freight and passenger services.

• Phase 1 – Linespeed improvements between Crewe and Norton Bridge, increasing the line speed on the ‘slow’ lines from 75mph to 100mph. Completed in March 2014, these works included modifications to the overhead line equipment and installation of four new signals.

• Phase 2 – Stafford resignalling. The installation of a new freight loop and the replacement of life expired signalling, telecoms and power supplies, with the signalling control transferred from the existing Stafford No4 and No5 signal boxes to Rugby, plus the installation of bi-directional signalling for all platforms and an increase in the ‘slow’ line speeds (predominantly used by local passenger/freight services) from 75mph to 100mph between Great Bridgeford (near Norton Bridge) and Stafford. Running from spring 2014 to late 2015 (with an August 2015 commissioning), the majority of these works will be delivered during weekends and midweek nights.

• Phase 3 – Norton Bridge remodelling. The construction of a grade-separated junction (flyover) at Norton Bridge, including 6 miles of new 100mph railway, 10 new bridge structures and one bridge enhancement, four river diversions, major environmental mitigation works, pipeline, road and footpath diversions and the construction of temporary haul roads. Main works are scheduled to run to 2017, with key commissionings in 2016. As a project of national significance, the Norton Bridge project has been the subject of a Development Consent Order application which was approved by the Secretary of State for Transport in March of this year following a consultation process dating back to 2010.

Staffordshire Alliance - The Stafford Area Improvements Programme is being delivered by the Staffordshire Alliance – a partnership of Atkins, Laing O’Rourke, Network Rail and VolkerRail, working as part of a new collaborative contract that will help to transform the delivery of rail infrastructure projects in the UK.

Atkins - (www.atkinsglobal.com) is one of the world's leading design, engineering and project management consultancies*, employing some 18,000 people across the UK, North America, Middle East, Asia Pacific and Europe. Our people’s breadth and depth of expertise and drive to ask why has allowed us to plan, design and enable some of the world’s most complex and time critical projects.
*15th largest global design firm (Engineering News-Record 2014) and the third largest multidisciplinary consultancy in Europe (Svensk Teknik och Design 2013).

Laing O’Rourke - A globally diverse engineering enterprise with a commitment to delivering Excellence Plus performance, founded on 164 years’ of experience. It funds, designs, manufactures, constructs and maintains the built environment – providing the facilities to accommodate, educate, employ, transport, care for and sustain communities. www.laingorourke.com

Network Rail – Network Rail is the not for dividend owner and operator of Britain's railway infrastructure, which includes the tracks, signals, tunnels, bridges, viaducts, level crossings and stations - the largest of which we also manage. We aim to provide a safe, reliable and efficient rail infrastructure for freight and passenger trains to use.

VolkerRail - A leading multi-disciplinary railway infrastructure contractor with over 70 years’ project experience in both the heavy and light rail sectors. In addition to the delivery of major projects, it provides design, manufacture, construction, installation and testing services in the following disciplines - electrification, HV power distribution, signalling, plant, track construction, renewals and maintenance. VolkerRail is part of VolkerWessels UK, a multi-disciplinary civil engineering, construction and rail group with a turnover of £700 million. VolkerWessels UK employs c2,000 staff in six operating companies. The group is the UK arm of Dutch based VolkerWessels, one of the largest construction groups in Europe