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Monday 14 Dec 2015

Stafford railway upgrade scheme sets track-laying record

Region & Route:

| North West & Central

Engineers building a new railway flyover near Stafford have set a new track-laying record, with more than 4km of new track installed over the weekend.

As part of Network Rail's Railway Upgrade Plan, Staffordshire Alliance workers are building the new flyover at Norton Bridge which will remove a major bottleneck on the Britain’s busiest passenger and freight railway, the West Coast mainline. It will also help provide the capacity for more passenger and freight services to run on the main route between London Euston and Glasgow.

Network Rail's previous record for laying track in a 48-hour period was 3,932m but over the weekend at Stafford 4,017m of track was installed. Teams worked throughout the weekend using two new track-construction machines.

Staffordshire Alliance manager Matt Clark said: "This is another massive milestone for the project and for the Railway Upgrade Plan to build a bigger, better railway. We are all now focussed on the completion of the remainder of this project to remove a major bottleneck on the West Coast main line, which will mean better journeys for train passengers and help drive economic growth along the length of the country.”

The £250m Stafford scheme is entering its final stages with the new rail-over-rail flyover set to be commissioned at Easter 2016.

Passengers are being advised to check before they travel on www.nationalrail.co.uk this Christmas while track formation works and bridge construction takes place at Stafford from 24 to 28 December.

The Staffordshire Alliance is a partnership made up of Atkins, Laing O’Rourke, Network Rail and VolkerRail.

The project has involved the construction of 11 new bridges, six miles of new track and a new 1.2km section of road, as well as four river diversions and movement of more than one million tonnes of earth.

A cutting has been created for the new lines branching off the existing West Coast main line at Little Bridgeford, north of Stafford. One line re-joins the main line towards Crewe and the other runs over the main line to re-join the Stone/Stoke-on-Trent line, avoiding the existing Norton Bridge junction.