Turning the Corner

By Amy Mason Doan

The West Coast Main Line is one of the grandest achievements of the Industrial Age. When it was built in the 1830s to link London with Birmingham, then the “workshop of the world,” it was the only long distance railway on Earth. It evolved into the busiest mixed-use rail corridor in the UK, a bustling passenger and commercial line connecting London, Glasgow, Edinburgh, and dozens of cities in between.

But as the pace of life sped up, the West Coast Main Line risked lagging behind the times. When the British government decided in 1998 to reduce journey times and add capacity to its rails, it was clear the job would not be a straightforward upgrade. The length of track—640 kilometers—was staggering. The system’s original steam engines couldn’t travel directly up steep hills, so rails were laid out to avoid them. The “line” is more curly than straight, presenting problems for today’s high-speed rail cars. Some sections were seriously dilapidated, and new trains would require a complete overhaul of signaling, power supply, and switching systems.

How to bring high-speed train travel to older, winding tracks and secure the system’s future without disrupting existing service? “It’s like remodeling a 150-year-old apartment building without moving the tenants,” says Tom McCarthy, the original project manager and West Coast program director. “If it’s shut down, it’s a major national issue.”

When Bechtel entered the picture in February 2002, the project was experiencing severe difficulties. Deadlines and proposed line speeds were unrealistic, the public had become wary, and owner-operator Railtrack was in bankruptcy.

The original plan had included 225-kilometer-per-hour trains and untested, computerized, “moving block” signaling technology. Bechtel assessed the project and restructured it into smaller segments for Network Rail, which took ownership in 2002. The new plan called for tilting trains running at up to 200 kph, using more sophisticated, radio-based signaling. Operation of the new trains would still require extensive infrastructure improvements.

To reduce inconvenience to the nation’s commuters and rail freighters by keeping blockades to a minimum, site work has mainly been restricted to nights and weekends. Many observers doubted that any of the revised goals could be met. To hit the first major milestone, crews had to renew 1,505 kilometers of track, install more than 966 kilometers of overhead wiring, set down 460 new sets of points (or switches), fit out 1,569 units of a new train protection warning system, and move nearly a million tonnes of ballast, enough to fill six supertankers.

Since as many as 100 different crews may dig up sections of track over a weekend and put them back together in time for the Monday commute, clear communication is vital. So Bechtel has gotten “closer to the ground,” says Implementation Director Dick McIlhattan.

By holding regular conference calls with contractors and line controllers, engineers are able to pinpoint potential delays and take action before it’s too late. Buffers have been put in place to avoid slipping into commute times; work is scheduled for completion at least three hours before track operations commence on Monday.

“We pulled all of the stakeholders together at every step toward each individual milestone,” says McIlhattan.

The number of current rail projects scattered around the UK has made obtaining government approvals, skilled labor, and parts more complicated than usual. Bechtel is using Six Sigma to reduce costs in the face of steep competition for resources.

On September 27, 2004, the first significant milestone was checked off when Pendolino tilting trains began service between London, Manchester, and Birmingham. Tilting trains can operate at high speeds on the curviest sections of track because their cars lean into turns, sort of like a motorcycle rider gliding around a corner. The technology ensures passenger safety and comfort without slowdowns.

Achievement of the first milestone quieted some naysayers and increased confidence among the many collaborating parties, including Network Rail, Bechtel, and train operating companies Virgin Trains, Silverlink, and Central Trains.

“The team effort and supportive environment have been absolutely crucial to delivery of the work,” says Tim Shoveller, performance and operations director for Virgin Trains West Coast in London.

Meeting the first major deadline also helped validate Bechtel’s decision to use “absolute track geometry,” a way of surveying, designing, installing, and maintaining tracks to extremely precise angle specifications. In areas where the trains’ tilting mechanism comes into play the most, tracks must be laid within plus or minus 10 millimeters horizontally and plus zero to minus 30 millimeters vertically from their designated positions. The approach is time-consuming, but studies have shown that the resulting tracks are more durable and less expensive to maintain than they would be using traditional methods.

The project has shown that such meticulous standards don’t have to be at odds with timeliness. Instead of employing back-end-loaded construction techniques, crews work simultaneously in assembly-line-style teams. Every step in the line renewal process—removal of old panels, excavation, reballasting of land under the track, and placement of new rails—is practiced on a small scale off-site before being undertaken in the field.

At the Polesworth site in southern England, the mechanized approach allowed a crew to relay 3,340 meters of track in 52.5 hours. Traditional methods would have allowed about half that amount of track to get upgraded in the same window.

The second major milestone was achieved on time on June 12, 2005, when the line between Crewe and Preston opened for 200 kph in tilt mode. On December 12, 2005, the sections between Preston and Glasgow and Rugby and Birmingham joined the high-speed club. Today, line speed has been improved along the whole route, and a major bottleneck in the Trent Valley has been removed.

Journey times between London and Manchester have been cut by 25 minutes, to two hours and five minutes, and the London to Glasgow trip is 42 minutes faster than before. Reliability far exceeds the target of 88 percent on time. Passengers have responded; Virgin Rail’s passenger numbers have risen significantly.

Some $2.5 billion of work remains, including speed enhancements to 160 kph on the London­-to-Northampton line, renovations at Rugby and Milton Keynes stations, a new maintenance depot, and addition of 5,000 parking spaces. But the project has turned a corner.

“The West Coast is now a model project,” Iain Coucher, deputy chief executive of Network Rail, told Railstaff Magazine in 2006. “It is a great lesson that we’ve learned, about how to undertake very large enhancement upgrades around an operational railway.” 

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