Belfast shipyard to build barges for the Thames
HARLAND & Wolff has been awarded an initial contract worth around £8.5 million with Cory for the fabrication of 11 barges.
The barges will be used by Cory to transport London’s recyclable and non-recyclable waste on the River Thames.
Fabrication will take place at Harland & Wolff’s Belfast site, with first steel being cut in about eight weeks’ time. The programme schedule allows for four barges to be built in tandem, with the entire build programme ending around mid- 2023. Fully fabricated barges will be sequentially delivered to Cory on the River Thames.
Harland & Wolff group CEO John Wood said: “With this material contract, we shall be opening up our vast under cover fabrication halls in Belfast and making optimal use of our new robotic welding panel line.
“This contract gives us the opportunity to optimise our production flows in readiness for other fabrication programmes in our pipeline and it demonstrates the variety of fabrication work that our facilities are ideally placed to execute upon. I am delighted to have secured this contract with our new client, Cory Group, and look forward to working very closely with them to deliver on their new barge investment programme going forward.”
This is the first new build order that Harland & Wolff ’s Belfast shipyard has announced since being bought out of administration in 2019.