Project Evergreen is an alliance between five different organisations that joined together to deliver a scheme to double track the railway between Aynho Junction and Bicester North on the Chiltern Railway Line.
The scope of the work included provision of new crossings and signals, duelling of the existing single line track therefore increasing the speed on the Down Line to 100 mph and 90 mph on the Up Line, improvement in track quality to suit revised line speeds, reduce the Headway Signalling Times, to maximise availability of the infrastructure and provide operational resilience.
By complying and achieving to the scope of the work it will increase capacity through more frequent services, allow faster journeys, improved journey time and enable safety to be further improved.
The project was valued at £60m and was an alliance between Railtrack, Chiltern Railways, GTRM, Westinghouse and Birse. Birse were responsible for the Civil and Embankment Improvement Work part of the contract.
This work required them to remove part of the existing embankments, provide retaining walls and safe cess and areas construction of new bridges.
The retaining walls were designed to be constructed by means of ground anchors mesh reinforcement and sprayed applied fast setting high early strength concrete. Thyssen Technical Services division who due to their technical capabilities and many years experience within the mining and tunnelling industries carrying out similar types of work were the appointed contractors for this work.
Mr John Shone of Thyssen Technical Services carried out field trials to ascertain which sprayed shotcrete would satisfy the client’s requirements. Following these trials it was decided that Natural Cement Distribution Ltd. SHOTCRETE 530 and 513 would be the ideal materials.
The decision to use Natural Cement Distribution Ltd SHOTCRETE 530 and 513 was based on the speed of set, high early strength gain, lack of rebound, ability to work in adverse conditions, waterproofing characteristics, corrosion resistant and that there is a total lack of additives within the products, making the products very environmentally friendly.
Thyssen successfully used over 300 tonnes of Natural Cement SHOTCRETE on the scheme.
Natural Cement Distribution Ltd again proved that their material, when applied by experienced CITB trained applicators, can and does save time and money and that it can be applied using all types of dry spray equipment.
Date added: 12/04/2022