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| INFRASTRUCTURE
A 50-acre Strategic Rail Freight Interchange Rob Cook, Winvic’s Civils and Infrastructure Director, speaks about the most recent project to start on site – SEGRO Logistics Park Northampton Gateway (SLPNG)
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EGRO knows they are in safe hands with Winvic on this Northamptonshire project as we’ve exceeded their expectations at every step of the way at the extraordinarily complex SEGRO Logistics Park East Midlands Gateway (SLPEMG). Here, we successfully delivered a substantial civils and infrastructure programme, a 50-acre Strategic Rail Freight Interchange (SRFI), seven kilometres rail, highways works, including construction of a skew bridge, major service diversions and multiple modern industrial units. Both SLPEMG in Leicestershire and SEGRO Logistics Park Northampton Gateway (SLPNG) are located in the UK’s logistics’ golden triangle and are designated as Nationally Significant Infrastructure
Projects (NSIP). The Northampton multimodal logistics hub, or inland port, is adjacent to junction 15 of the M1 and spans 450 acres. It includes a 35-acre SRFI and, when complete, will also comprise five million square feet of industrial facilities. Our three-year contract, valued at £107.5 million, also comprises the delivery of major Rail Professional
upgrades to Junctions 15 and 15a on the M1, a new bridge over the West Coast Mainline, the construction of a bypass around the village of Roade, improvements to the A45 and safer junctions along the A508. We got started on site after the Christmas break and the civils and infrastructure works started with a number of preparatory activities such demolishing a number of unsafe barns and clearing a lot of vegetation. However, we were involved in pre-construction too, conducting important ecology, archaeology and geotechnical enabling works. Avoiding underground service strikes is always high on our safety agenda so this rigorous process also commences early. Explorations have taken place in areas where services should or even could be present – often by hand or
through vacuum extraction – and physical markers are set in the ground. After service diversions and ecological measures – such as the relocation of badger setts and 1,300 metres of hedge translocation – have been completed at the end of February, activity will centre on the initial groundworks. We’ve worked on larger areas and cut
deeper into existing ground levels, but we will certainly have shifted a lot of muck by the time we’re finished with these earthworks. These works involve stripping the topsoil and executing almost 4.5 million m3 of cut and fill to facilitate the development plateaus, M1 J15 works and the rail terminal infrastructure. Our policy is to always transport as little excavated material away from a site as possible – to reduce HGV movements on local roads and to minimise the impact on the environment – and with this project all material will be used to create screening bunds around the site perimeter. The stress resistant, fibre reinforced concrete terminal slab at SLPNG is 409,000 square feet and is made up of two distinct areas; the intermodal sections that are and run either side of the siding have been designed to withstand significantly greater weights than the aggregate terminal, or HGV only area. This is primarily to accommodate extensive reach stacker operations, with vehicles that are 108 tonnes gross weight, but also to withstand the weight of containers stacked 15 metres high and loaded to 25 tonnes each. It may appear to be ‘just a concrete slab’, albeit made up of 14,000 m3 of concrete, but the engineering principals are very complex. We have to take into account material costs of course, but it’s finding the balance for durability and length of life. What
