3 Phased Design for Triangle Sidings

The Triangle Sidings project was undertaken on behalf of Volker Rail for London Underground (LU). It is part of an extensive programme of platform, track and signalling modifications to accommodate new trains on the District, Metropolitan and Hammersmith & City lines which is currently being undertaken by LU.

Five into three will go

Triangle Sidings sits below the old West London Air Terminal (now a Sainsbury’s supermarket!), just off the Cromwell Road in west London. In order to accommodate the new longer S stock trains, Triangle Sidings has had its capacity reduced from five to three sidings. NTTX designers were involved in all three stages of the project:

• creating a decommissioning design, which enabled the sidings to be taken out of commission to facilitate the track changes. This design ensured that the worksite was protected from the adjacent main line where trains continued to operate;
• producing a design to recover the redundant equipment from the original siding layout. This enabled the track re-modelling to be carried out, whilst the remainder of the existing interlocking operated the railway around the work site; and
• introducing the new sidings into commission.

A new timetable was introduced which marked the start of the sidings being used as part of the District Line operations.

The team was on site during the commissioning weekend to ensure everything went smoothly and to provide design support.

As Vinod Rajani reports: “Obviously when you are working on existing equipment you have to provide a design that is safe and fit for purpose. But you also have to create a design which challenges the extent of work required, so that you achieve the project objectives whilst keeping overall project costs as lean as possible.

“On the Triangle Sidings project, the team worked with track engineers, LU acceptance engineers and project managers and successfully challenged a number of standards. The result was a safe design solution which we were able to deliver far more efficiently than originally envisaged.”

Munir Patel of NTTX adds: “The project is a great example of what our team excels at: supporting the client’s objectives and working hard to deliver to challenging deadlines, whilst maintaining the highest levels of safety and integrity. Our guys have a wealth of experience in the railway signalling industry and they pride themselves on their flexibility and ability to develop and delivery workable design solutions.”

Since late 2010, NTTX has also completed a variety of assignments, including Victoria Line Upgrade checking work for Invensys Rail and legacy signalling design and control designs for London Underground Limited.