Birmingham’s New Street Sttion has seen some significant changes over the past year. In December 2009, representatives of Network Rail and scheme designers Atkins explained what changes were planned over the next six years to increase the capacity of the busy 1960s concrete station and make it fit for the 21st century. Twelve months on, we’ve been back to see how this £600 million project has progressed.
Joe Public, that well-known observer and commentator on all things railway, hasn’t noticed much happening to be honest. He has even asked members of the project team when they’re going to start! But there have been some changes. The slightly sleazy fast-food outlets on Stephenson Street have been closed and hidden behind hoardings with large Mace stickers on them. The entrance to the car park on the corner of Navigation Street is also shut and there are quite a few HV-clad people wandering about the area.
Inside the station, Joe has been unable to catch a train from Platform 1 for a few months and there has often been an engineering train sat there, used to transport materials to and from site and keeping hundreds of lorries off the city’s streets. But it’s been business as usual on the other 11 platforms and there hasn’t been any problem catching a train. A few hoardings appeared in the Pallisades Shopping Centre for a time but most of them have come down again. Oh, and the taxis still park in the same place although they now take a slightly different route to get there.
And that’s about it – not much for a year’s hard work. However, it’s what has been going on behind those hoardings that’s important so we too donned our HV to have a look around. We went through a security gate, walked up the now-closed ramp to the car park and found ourselves in a busy project office.
There are three main partners working on the scheme – Network Rail of course (it’s their station after all), designers Atkins and delivery partner Mace. The three are so well integrated that it’s sometimes difficult to know who you are speaking with. But this being the main project works office, most had Mace on the back of their jackets. As most of the design work has been completed, Atkins is now down to a core group of 14 staff looking after GRIP stage 6; Network Rail’s project team is mainly housed at the nearby Axis building.
What’s involved
Birmingham New Street is classified as an underground station. All the tracks run through an excavated box below street level and are accessed through tunnels at either end. Platforms 1 and 12 are against the side walls although the latter has two small docks to its rear. The other ten are on five island platforms that run approximately east-west. The platforms are very long – all 12 have both an A and B section; there is even a 4C. So functionally there are 25 berths available for use although some complicated planning would be involved to use all of them simultaneously!
Above the platforms is a 150mm thick concrete raft. Approximately one-third of this supports the concourse which is too small for the number of passengers that use this busy station, as well as offices and back-of-house areas. The remaining two-thirds form the base of a multi-storey car park. Above the concourse is the Pallisades Shopping Centre. This and the station form a complex that’s roughly square, with four expansion joints running through the whole building – two east-west and two north-south, dividing it up in the shape of a Noughts & Crosses board. All nine segments are self-supporting.
The Gateway Project will enlarge the concourse, make the centre of the station light and airy by opening it up to the sky, and change the outward appearance of the old concrete station by covering it in a mirror-finish stainless steel façade. Phase one, to be completed by autumn 2012, will create a new concourse area in the old multi-story car park. That will then be opened and the old one closed. The redundant concourse and offices will then be stripped out and, in 2015, the separating wall will be removed and the combined concourse finished off.
In one of the flashes of inspiration that highlight a good project, someone realised that, as the building actually comprises nine free-standing sections, the middle one can be removed without disturbing the other eight. This will allow daylight to flood the centre of the concourse by placing a transparent roof over it. The whole aspect of the area will be completely transformed.
Delete one car park
So, for the last year and unnoticed by Joe, work has been going on to strip out the car park. The new concourse will effectively be the height of two car park levels so a complete floor has had to be removed.
Mace entrusted this work to Coleman & Co, a company experienced in demolishing buildings without affecting the surrounding area. First, holes were knocked in the side walls so that the concrete waste could be removed. Then three sets of rails were installed down the length of the building and fitted with 10-tonne overhead cranes. This allowed the task of cutting the concrete to start.
The entire structure is supported by large reinforced concrete columns. At each floor level primary beams run east-west between them whilst secondary beams sit north-south. Over these are laid 150mm thick rafts, three wide between each column.
Movement sensors were attached to the beams of the floor above to monitor any movement of the structure as the middle floor started to come out. First the floor rafts were cut up into pieces and transported by crane to the side of the building, loaded onto lorries and taken away. Next the secondary beams were supported, sliced up and carried off; then the same with the primary beams. Care had to be taken – the pieces often weighed 8 tonnes and, if one had been dropped, it could have damaged the floor and even broken through to the live railway beneath. Careful planning and attention to detail ensured this didn’t happen.
Crushed and recycled
As areas were cleared, leaving the free-standing vertical columns, steel bracing beams designed by Atkins were installed while checks were made to see if anything was moving. One small area of concern was that the exposed columns are now over twice their original designed height. Stephen Ashton, Atkins’ project manager, believes there will be a need for designed strengthening sleeves to be installed to reduce the columns’ effective length.
The removed concrete beams were sectioned to check their condition and nothing was found to give any suggestion that the original building structure had deteriorated in any way. In all, about 7,500 tonnes of reinforced concrete was taken out and hauled away to Coleman’s facility at Meriden. There it will be crushed and recycled – the aim being to reuse 85% of the spoil over the project’s course.
With the whole floor removed, the new concourse area looks enormous – it is already 120m long – and will get bigger as the wall separating it from the back of the closed retail units on Stephenson Street is next on the demolition list. As the floor of those units is several feet above the new concourse level, a ramp will be provided from the new pedestrian access.
Mick Carter, Network Rail’s Construction Manager, pointed out that the main services spine for the station runs down the wall between the current concourse and the new section. This will have to be moved to the other side of the space where it will be hung from the ceiling. And as New Street is an underground station, all the services will need to be fireproofed.
Platform level
At platform level another team has been rebuilding Platform 1. Driving holes into the side support wall, they opened up an access to a forgotten space the size of a typical living room. It didn’t appear on any station plans and is thought to be the lower level of a hotel that once stood on the site. Dubbed ‘Room 999’ by the workforce, contained within it was a mixture of old timetables, abandoned scaffolding, telecoms and other services. It had to be cleaned out, made structurally safe and resealed but with an access door so that periodic safety inspections can be made.
Bases for the escalators that will connect the platform with the new concourse are in place although the moving stairways won’t be installed until nearer the 2012 opening date. A temporary waiting room has been built. The final design will have open platforms with all the waiting areas up on the concourse but, until that’s finished, provision will have to be made on each platform. All the materials came in on the twice-weekly works train from Bordesley Sidings, with spoil leaving the same way.
In the middle of December, Platform 1 was handed back and work moved to Platform 12. Thereafter, one platform face at a time will be worked on with Platform 2 being next. The West Dock has been filled in and will house the rainwater catch tanks and other services. The East Dock, at the other end of Platform 12, is to remain.
Next to the platform area, but still below street level, is a space known as the ‘Hinterland’. Here were the train operating company offices and rest-rooms, the railway caterers and various other services. CrossCountry Trains’ staff have been moved to a temporary three-storey office block next to the 26-floor Stephenson’s Tower which will start to be demolished this month. A hole has been cut in the ground-level raft into the Hinterland so that a tower crane can be installed to help with its demise.
Seasonal progress
So that’s what has been going on, largely out of sight, over the past 12 months. According to John Worthington, Mace’s Head of Construction, Christmas 2010 was the cusp. From here on, Joe and his friends will have a much better view of what’s happening.
Over the festive season, the replacement of Navigation Street’s narrow bridge section with a span reaching Hill Street had to be postponed due to safety issues brought by the freezing temperatures. But piling started to support the raft that will cover the open east void at the ends of platforms 8-11. The crane goes up shortly and Stephenson’s Tower will start to come down, a process that will take six months. And in the middle of the year, fitting will start on that mirror-finish façade on Stephenson Street. Stephen Ashton calls it a “massive and exciting” project and he’s not wrong.
