Tube Lines’ station upgrade programme thrives

With a capital investment of £500 million, Tube Lines’ station upgrade programme is one of the largest in the world. Over the last five years, the programme has been delivered on time and within budget.

Almost two million people use the Jubilee, Northern and Piccadilly lines every day. That’s over a quarter of the population in the Greater London area and is seen as a very serious amount of footfall. The complete Underground system carries more people daily than the entire UK rail network and that figure grows at 7% a year.

In this light, the work that Tube Lines is doing right now, and has been doing for the last five years, is even more significant.

It is fair to say that the Victorian tunnels and infrastructure wasn’t designed for this level of passenger usage and that is the challenge we face.

Our responsibility lies with the maintenance and upgrade of all physical assets on our three lines and our stations team has just delivered its 51st station upgrade on time and budget. We have to upgrade another 46 stations by 2010 so the pressure is very much on.

A typical station upgrade project will focus on delivering improvements within at least 18 prescribed areas. These include structural repairs, renewed signage and lighting, installing tactile floor tiles and improved handrails for elderly or people with impaired vision.

Underground essentials

I know what it takes to get the job done in a deep level Tube station and it’s not straightforward. That’s what makes my job and the job of our delivery teams so rewarding. Repainting surfaces, including the curved roofs of platform tunnels may sound a simple job – until you look at what’s involved in getting that type of work done on the Underground.

Moving workers, materials and equipment into a station and setting up safely and quickly after the last train has gone takes time. A few hours later and we’re doing the reverse and cleaning up and removing everything and everyone safely. We don’t cut it fine either; we have to be out in good time for a methodical walk around the site to make sure everything is as it should be. The upshot is that, at times, we may only have a couple of hours to do the actual work which is why we will have literally hundreds of people working at a time. It really is a sight to see.

Aesthetic improvements are an important focus of the works in our station upgrades but there is a genuine emphasis on improving security, information and the overall travelling experience. Indeed our contract with London Underground sets the specifics of what modernisation entails. Installations include new CCTV systems that give better coverage of every part of a station, new passenger help points and improvements to floors and surfaces. Individual stations will have their own circumstances that dictate its scope of works.

We also look for a balanced relationship with London Underground to make sure quality and finishing, and of course scope, are agreed.

Whole life solutions

We also strive to deliver the best whole life solutions. A 30-year contract means that a financially attractive solution today may well end up costing longer over the life of our contract. We do lots of work internally to make sure that once a station is upgraded our maintenance teams can work on the assets more easily and efficiently to keep them within agreed condition benchmarks and performance.

The current £18 million upgrade of Waterloo Underground station will take approximately 12 months to complete. This compares with smaller, less complex, stations where the time taken to upgrade has been as little as four months, such as North Ealing station on the Piccadilly line. Angel and Mornington Crescent stations were completed in six months.

A significant portion of the work at Waterloo is going to improve water ingress management. Stations deep underground, close to the water table or the Thames may have inefficient drainage or pumping technology.

The assets in place will be coming to the end of their useful life and that’s where the benefits of the PPP come in. We are providers of a stable investment programme; 97 out of our 100 stations will have had modernisation or upgrade work done on them by 2010. We are currently working on 12 stations.

Detailed surveys, design and preparatory works are carried out before construction starts. Initial site work is usually done overnight to keep disruption to a minimum, though this may not be the most effective way of going about it over the course of a station project. Challenging time restrictions are helped by some closures of stations at weekends communicated well in advance at stations.

Working straight through in eight hour shifts over a 56 hour weekend means that anywhere between 50 and 500 operatives at a time are able to work more efficiently and ensure a station will be upgraded on schedule.

Upgraded stations are better able to meet the travelling needs of rapidly growing passenger numbers. 2007 was the first year in the 144 year history of the London Underground that more than a billion passenger journeys were made. The London Underground is known to be a key economic and social network in London and we’re proud to be asset-steward to three of the busiest lines.

Waterloo station will also benefit from 150,000m of new signalling and communications cable, 44 new public help points, 1,300 speakers and more than 500 CCTV cameras. New CCTV cameras will give absolute coverage of the entire station improving on the already good safety and security systems. Lighting systems will also be improved to enhance the travelling environment. Platform and staff areas will benefit from redecorated surfaces and finishes.

Tough beginnings, lessons learnt

Have we always got it right? As an overall programme, I can safely say that we haven’t got it wrong. We have been on a learning curve right from the start of our programme back in 2003. The first 20 stations we modernised took on average 18 months to complete. No-one before has done the kind of sustained programme of works that we’re doing with our stations.

Once work started on site we were discovering that actual conditions were more intricate than our plans. Also, inherited partnership agreements meant that at times we needed more control for procurement, scheduling and costs. We were working with major contractors and designers who would use sub-contractors for specialised tasks.

As a company, we learnt the benefit of an independent contracting methodology. We hired specialised sub-contractors ourselves and project managed the work independently. One layer of management and its associated overhead costs were eliminated. Procurement, schedules and costs were bought in-house. Bringing scoping and design works in-house also allowed us to maintain tighter control.

With more flexibility in performing work, there are fewer delays in communication and decision-making. Self procurement means economies of scale come into play and we have built good relationships with our suppliers. Five years into our programme, construction managed station upgrades are saving 38% of costs compared with the first of our upgrades thanks to the new approach.

Our approach is working because we have the right people working for us. We place an emphasis on employees taking personal responsibility for improving the way work is undertaken on the Tube – the construction managed approach is just one enabler of this. All managers have been on ‘Leading Change’, a bespoke training course that encourages people to think about how they can personally make a difference.

Project Managers feel very strongly about their individual stations and as well as being a very stressful position, it’s also a prestigious one. Prior to Tube Lines’ inception, only a few stations were being upgraded each year and that was partly down to the way that the Tube was funded. Some have compared it to using a sticking plaster on a very deep cut, it was nowhere near enough.

We’ve brought about positive change at 51 stations so far and it’s proving to be a success. We are really getting the results we anticipated and capitalising on this will help to reach Tube Lines’ vision of delivering an outstanding Tube for London.