Mitigating Railway Risks on Third Party Local Authority Highway Projects

Local highway authorities are progressively turning to single sourced framework agreements to balance increasing highway capacity demands with ever reducing capital and operational budgets.

In taking this step a key concern is ensuring all the necessary rail related knowledge and experience in your chosen framework provider. This is vital to ensure your project and third party engagement risks are comprehensively identified and managed on your behalf.

On each project we manage, early engagement with Network Rail is crucial, so that outline design concepts and proposed construction methodologies can be discussed in principle before detailing commences. A philosophy of ensuring that Network Rail is fully engaged as far as is required during the design phase for both temporary and permanent works is adopted via the Network Rail Outside Parties / Asset Protection teams and, importantly, a culture of “no surprises” is maintained.

Our aim is to de-risk your highways projects interfacing with or crossing the railway. Osborne has a wealth of people approved by Network Rail to provide expert advice and peer reviews on submissions, design development and contingency planning to ensure well planned, efficient solutions developed utilising our in-house expertise.

Osborne have undertaken a number of rail-related projects for outside parties including Central Bedfordshire where we replaced a bridge deck over the East Coast Main Line, and Featherbed Lane Bridge at Apsley for a residential developer – designing and building the new bridge offline to be launched over the Railway.

More recently, Osborne, along with its supply chain partners opened the M27, Romsey Bridge, 16 hours ahead of schedule.  This follows a weekend closure of the M27 where Osborne, along side supply chain partners demolished the western half of the Romsey Road Bridge. This was the first time in Highways, that a road bridge has been demolished next to another which has remained in use and been handed back fit for use.