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Ordsall Chord

Ordsall Chord is key to the north

Public inquiry into a crucial and controversial Ordsall Chord section of Network Rail’s £530m Northern Hub investment started last week. Ed Lacey, Northern Hub project manager for the scheme's programme manager Parsons Brinckerhoff explains the vital connection in Manchester.

Northern Hub is an upgrade of the UK’s northern rail network. It aims to stimulate economic growth in the North through better connections between key towns and cities such as Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield and Leeds. Network Rail anticipates it will bring over £4bn of wider economic benefit and potentially create up to 30,000 new jobs in the region.

Critical to the success of the Hub programme, are a series of alterations and improvements in the Manchester area. The investment focuses on tackling bottlenecks and making better use of the available infrastructure. Probably the most important of these is construction of the Ordsall Chord - a striking new Network Arch bridge structure connected to a sweeping new section of railway on viaduct, which will form a direct link between Manchester’s main stations; Victoria, Oxford Road and Piccadilly, for the first time.

"Manchester is the birthplace of modern railways and there is an abundance of heritage sites and listed structures to contend with. And at all stages, considerable care has been taken to ensure that the solutions promoted are sensitive to this history and the concerns of local stakeholders."

Once the Chord is operational, it will ease a ‘bottleneck’ to the south of Piccadilly station, open up a new direct service from the East, through the city to Manchester Airport and enable faster, more frequent services to run across the North of England.

Operationally, the Hub is also linked to a host of national and regional rail programmes, including the North West Electrification Programme, now part of the Northern Hub and Electrification Alliance. Taken together, the output from these programmes will enable hundreds more trains daily, catering for up to 44 million extra passenger journeys each year.

At Parsons Brinckerhoff, we have spent nearly three years working in collaboration with Network Rail to help develop designs for the Hub programme and plan its delivery and integration into the existing network; we have also been instrumental in the alignment and design of the Chord.

Plans for the Chord were submitted to the Department of Transport last September following an 18 month consultation period with local and regional stakeholders. Once the public inquiry is over, and assuming permission is granted, Network Rail will start construction of the Chord towards early next year (see story on the on-going public inquiry).

With the Northern Hub programme now fully funded, the next stage for Network Rail is to move forward with detailed design work on all other aspects as quickly as possible. Network Rail anticipates that the entire Hub infrastructure will be in place to enable services to operate by 2018.

In addition to the Ordsall Chord, other aspects include remodelling Oxford Road Station and the addition of two new platforms at Manchester Piccadilly to allow more trains to run through rather, than terminating in Manchester - providing more direct train services across the north.

New tracks will also be installed on the line between Leeds and Liverpool and between Sheffield and Manchester, which will allow fast trains between the major towns and cities to overtake slower trains. Additionally, in advance of this work, Manchester Victoria station will be redeveloped and transformed into a new gateway to the city.

"Once the Chord is operational, it will ease a ‘bottleneck’ to the south of Piccadilly station, open up a new direct service from the East, through the city to Manchester Airport and enable faster, more frequent services to run across the North of England."

Of course there have been - and will continue to be - plenty of challenges along the way; Manchester is the birthplace of modern railways and there is an abundance of heritage sites and listed structures to contend with. And at all stages, considerable care has been taken to ensure that the solutions promoted are sensitive to this history and the concerns of local stakeholders.

But this is an exciting and challenging project. The benefits it will bring to the communities in the north will be felt much more widely than just where improvements are made. Businesses on both sides of the Pennines should be more attractive to a wider pool of talent, while employees should be able to access work more quickly and easily. Journey time improvements will allow rail to better compete with road to provide quicker, efficient and more sustainable journeys between city centres.

This is the type of infrastructure development the country needs and it is encouraging to see the railway industry rising to the challenge of delivering it, along with the many other exciting infrastructure projects at various stages of delivering elsewhere. But the important thing is to get on with them now - and not wait.

Ed Lacey is the Northern Hub project manager for the scheme's programme manager Parsons Brinckerhoff

 

"English Heritage leads opposition to Network Rail's Ordsall Chord project" - click here for story