…as NR shaves £100m off the final cost

The total cost to Network Rail of the King’s Cross project has been slashed by over £100 million, according to NR’s London North Eastern and East Midlands Route Managing Director Rob McIntosh.

The large savings were made following his decision to defer the project (which had been due for completion by January 2019) by a further year at a stage-gate review held in January 2016.

With the project at GRIP 3 (option selection) in NR’s eightstage Governance for Railway Investments Process, McIntosh asked his team (led by Route Delivery Director Rob Cairns) to reconsider the engineering options and how they might more costeffectively comply with technical specifications for interoperability (TSIs) for rail, including the clearance required between overhead line equipment and other structures.

They did this by integrating BIM (Building Integration Management) and virtual reality into the design process, which made individual compliant and non-compliant aspects of the design much easier to identify.

McIntosh said that this approach ensured that expensive design interventions could be targeted to only where they were strictly necessary, and that over £100m had been saved by eliminating areas where they were not.

He also told RAIL that the decision to further scrutinise plans for the project, despite incurring delays, demonstrated how much Network Rail has tightened its grip on project management and the cost of enhancements, following heavy criticism over its planning and delivery of Great Western electrification.

“I looked at the readiness of the project and it wasn’t ready, so I talked to my maintenance guys and asked them if they could keep the current layout going for another year,” he said.

“We decided to get GRIP 3 right and the engineering right, and I was very pleased with the end result. It was absolutely the right decision to make and reflects well on how far NR has come on a journey about the discipline of its gateways.

“The key to achieving the savings was to spend longer in GRIP 3 to do BIM modelling and draw up detailed designs. We could then see how reasonably practicable it was to comply with TSIs. I have been delighted with what the IP [Infrastructure Projects] team has done and how they have embraced the challenge.”

For a full and exclusive interview with Rob McIntosh and for more details on the King’s Cross project, see pages 42-45.