Mark Somers, Network Rail Project Director, gave media a guided tour round the new look station at London Gatwick Airport. He was joined by Anne Clark Programme Lead, Gatwick station remodelling project at GTR (Govia Thameslink Railway) and they explained how the Covid Lockdown affected the project.
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00:00 At the moment we're standing over tracks 6 and 7, platform 7, platform 6, tracks 6 and 7,
00:09 both downfast lines.
00:13 And just to give you an appreciation, when you look at this structure and you'll see it better from the platform,
00:21 just how challenging it has been to construct this above a 24/7 operational railway.
00:28 365 days of the year we've worked here, generally getting around about 4 hours a night working with a fast line possession
00:39 and maximising the use and obviously you can't work on any of these parts of these elements of the structure
00:45 when you've got an open railway.
00:47 So that has been a massive challenge for us, you can't work on the roof and the edges of the roof,
00:52 you can't have stuff dropping down onto the railway.
00:55 And to be honest with you, I think in the 3 years we've been here we've maybe had 1 or 2 incidents
01:02 where a bit of pipe or a bit of loose material has gone down, but it's been very, very well managed by Costains.
01:10 Their safety processes and procedures have been excellent, I have to say, really, really good.
01:15 Can you just talk also, just talk about how Covid affected the...
01:20 Yes, absolutely, so obviously, I mean it's funny because I came from Crossrail,
01:26 we were trying to open 9 new stations and 70km of new tunnels right in the middle when Covid happened
01:33 and one of the key roles that I undertook as project director there was to put together the recovery programme for Crossrail
01:43 as to how we would finish it with Covid restrictions in place.
01:47 It's very similar here, you had to introduce testing regimes, control stations,
01:54 constantly testing everybody on every shift to make sure you weren't bringing people on site who were infected.
02:03 The impact to the workforce was huge, but beyond that, the impact to the supply chain
02:10 and the extraordinary inflationary pressures it put on the supply chain obviously massively increased costs
02:19 and impacted the programme significantly and as you can imagine, you can just see here
02:25 the amount of material that we're delivering and supplying here.
02:29 You know, Covid wasn't a short-term thing, it went on for at least 2 years in overall terms.
02:36 We're still even now experiencing some of the effects of Covid that it's had on the markets
02:44 and the overall impact to supply chain across the board, so it has been very, very significant.
02:50 Yeah, I mean as Mark says, on the resource side, a lot of issues, however, there was a plus side, if I can say that,
02:56 because of the lack of passengers and all the works on the current station concourse,
03:00 there was a lot more the project team could do in a quicker timescale than us having to phase it.
03:05 So there was a minor plus side, you know, not that you want Covid and the pandemic,
03:09 but it probably stopped on a much smaller scale than Crossrail, as Mark said.
03:13 They probably had to put a couple of weeks to re-plan, put individual pods in, safe working practices, etc.
03:20 So yes, they managed through that period.
03:23 How long has the programme actually gone back, can you give us an estimate, when you started?
03:28 Well, it's difficult to say that because we've increased scope.
03:32 We introduced the track changes, signal changes, as Mark said.
03:36 The original timescales were for it to finish earlier this year.
03:40 So within the same year?
03:42 Yeah, it was the end of April this year.
03:46 The other major, I mean, if you can just try and imagine this concourse,
03:54 if you look up, what you can see is a very significant steel structure, okay?
04:02 And before the roof cassettes went on, these are roof cassettes here,
04:07 before that was lifted on, before the ETFE pillows, this was a completely open structure.
04:15 Because of the design requirements for both security but also for fire,
04:21 most of the connection points that you've got here in this structure require intermescent paint to be applied,
04:27 which is fire-resistant paint.
04:30 That requires four layers of paint to be applied to every connection point.
04:36 And if you were just to look here and see every one of these, that's a connection point there.
04:40 There's another one there, there's another one there, there's another one there.
04:44 That's throughout the whole structure, literally hundreds of multiple bolted,
04:50 some of them up to M50 bolts, connection points and welding points all had to be painted
04:56 before we could allow Pratus to start installing all of these cassettes.
05:01 And that's done by hand, that painting?
05:03 Yep, all done by hand.
05:05 People on cherry pickers like you've got here, dabbing in paint, going in.
05:10 You can't put intermescent paint in if the humidity level's above 95%.
05:15 You can't put intermescent paint on if the temperature's below 5 degrees.
05:20 You can't put intermescent paint on if the surface is wet, i.e. it's raining.
05:25 Guess what?
05:27 From about October last year through to April this year, it was pretty much like that for the entire period.
05:35 So there's some huge challenges for Costains to overcome to get to what you see now.
05:41 Actually a really significant achievement.