King’s Cross uncrossed: an exemplar project
When RAIL first revealed plans for the King’s Cross remodelling project in January 2018 ( RAIL 843), it was heralded by Network Rail for its pioneering design work and intelligent interpretation of standards.
Speaking exclusively to RAIL, NR’s Eastern Region Managing Director Rob McIntosh declared that the cost of the work had been slashed by £100 million, by his team (led by Cairns) considering how they might more cost-effectively comply with Technical Specifications for Interoperability for rail (TSIs).
These included the three-metre clearance required between overhead line equipment and other structures, which was threatening to force NR to rebuild a glazed footbridge that had been installed as recently as 2012.
Had that been done, a highly expensive chain reaction would also have been triggered of extra work in the tunnels and beyond, in order to bring the project into line with the latest TSIs.
The alternative was for Cairns and his team to challenge the standards and to also integrate 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.
Speaking to RAIL Managing Editor and Events Director Nigel Harris in late 2017, Cairns said: “We had to think outside the box. We did a risk assessment which concluded that the way the footbridge is closely monitored and managed meant that we didn’t have to renew it. That meant the knock-on work wasn’t needed either, so we eliminated a potential cost over-run of £100m or so - about 50%.”
McIntosh, who had paused and ordered the rethink of the project in 2016 owing to its high original costs, added: “If you make these challenges in the right way - as Rob has just described - then you set out a rational argument and you get a reasonable outcome.”
Now that the project is in its delivery phase, Cairns stands by his earlier statements over the magnitude of the savings that are on course to be delivered, despite the total cost of the works having now risen since 2017 from £ 237m to £ 259m.
He says: “We are on track to deliver those savings, and I think it is a success story in that regard in many ways. In the development stage we had a difficult decision to make around whether we gave ourselves a slightly easier ride and try to comply with all the current standards and TSIs, but to carry the costs of doing that.
“One of those costs would almost certainly have been the reconstruction of the passenger footbridge, because overhead wire clearance into the platforms was nowhere near compliant.
“One of the challenges we faced was whether to comply with everything and spend £100m or go down this tenuous route of challenging everything and retaining a lot more of the existing infrastructure, but also the non-compliance that comes with it.
“We carried project risk with the regulator by going down that route, but have been successful by working with the regulator very well. But, while that sounds like an amazingly good news story with things such as Project Speed now being talked about, it did cause us to extend the design period by a year to solve these compliance issues - which was the price we paid.”
He adds: “I think we’ve got to £ 259m now. There are a number of COVID-19-related costs in there, but by and large the major cost avoidance that we wanted to secure we have avoided.”