The Ordsall Chord in Manchester, UK is a new railway viaduct and associated track alteration, renewal and re-signalling scheme to provide a direct connection between the city’s Piccadilly and Victoria stations. Completed and opened to traffic in December 2017, it was designed and delivered to achieve the aspirations for a landmark structure within a constrained and complex setting. This paper highlights the benefits of the alliance procurement arrangement, which enabled genuine collaboration between the parties and early engagement of specialist sub-contractors. The benefits of installing adequate monitoring instrumentation are also discussed.
The Ordsall Chord rail link project in Manchester, UK was designed using building information modelling. Federated three-dimensional models produced by all design disciplines were held in a common data environment, with modelling developed down to the level of individual reinforcement bars. Early involvement of both the main contractor and its steel fabrication subcontractor allowed conventional roles and processes to be challenged. The design models and drawings were produced on the designer's behalf by the steelwork subcontractor, although these models and drawings were still owned by the structural designer. In some cases, drawings were dispensed with entirely, and key structures were built directly from the digital model, prepared in collaboration between fabricator and designer, and taking advantage of the fabricator's highly automated working method. This paper explains the contractual arrangements and collaborative behaviours that allowed conventional roles to be challenged, and discusses the efficiencies that resulted.
The Ordsall Chord is a new railway connecting the main-line stations in Manchester, UK, for the first time, reducing congestion, introducing new passenger services and bringing significant economic benefits. The new railway intersects the line of George Stephenson’s 1830 Liverpool and Manchester Railway and connects to two further nineteenth-century railway viaducts. It had a significant physical and visual impact on highly sensitive heritage assets. This first part of a pair of companion papers summarises the project and explains the history of the heritage structures, the consent process and the taken overall approach to conservation architecture and engineering. The design carefully considered the physical, visual and contextual relationship between old and new structures. This paper summarises the structural monitoring work undertaken on the existing brick railway. Other significant works, such as demolition, underpinning and refurbishment of historic metal bridges, are presented and explained. The paper summarises some of the building recording, archaeological investigation and public-realm landscaping works undertaken.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.