The project director’s view
Steve Kay is UK Infrastructure Operations Manager at Bechtel, which led the engineering consortium tasked with completing the construction of HS1 and the refurbishment of St Pancras International in 2007.
Between 2006 and 2008 he was project director, the man responsible for taking it through testing and commissioning through to handover and completion.
Kay says that many of the plaudits for the station redevelopment go to the highly visual improvements that were made, such as cleaning up the brickwork and re-glazing the station roof. But some of the most significant achievements were made behind the scenes in areas that are much less obvious to station users.
He says: “All of the station systems, including railway operations, communications links and security feeds, needed to be fed into a central data network that was off the scale in terms of what we’d seen before at railway stations. For example, there were 200-300 CCTV cameras and PA speakers which all needed tying into the station control room. The system was designed so that if any help point button around the station was pressed the nearest CCTV camera would automatically focus in on it. It doesn’t seem much now but that was fairly cutting edge at the time.”
As a Grade 1-listed building of national historic interest, Kay also remembers the painstaking sensitivity with which the renovation was approached, to comply with strict conservation principles. Key design and construction decisions were made in conjunction with English Heritage, while original materials were reused or salvaged where possible.
Almost a million red bricks were sourced from the same part of the East Midlands as the originals, and new roof slates purchased from the original quarry in Wales. Meanwhile, ironwork was recoated in paint that was carefully matched with the original sky blue colour used by the Midland Railway Company 140 years earlier.
He adds: “You couldn’t even drill a hole without permission from English Heritage and, if you ignored that, you could go to prison. But you didn’t need the threat of prison because you felt like you were working on a project that you would want to tell your grandkids about, and so we regularly held things up to get the proper permissions. I sit in there now and I can remember individual bricks because it was that personal to get it right.
“The big payoff for me was creating a legacy for how engineers will be looked at in another 150 years. When we design and build in the UK the rest of the world watches. The next challenge will be HS2, and that’s when I think the rest of the world will once again point and say ‘we want one like that’.”