Balfour Beatty : proud to be part of the transformation of London Bridge station

News listings

10 May 2018

The UK's fourth busiest railway station, London Bridge, has been officially reopened by Prince William the Duke of Cambridge following a £1+ billion transformation carried out by Network Rail in collaboration with Balfour Beatty and other partners.

The transformed station will nearly double its passenger capacity and enable more and faster connections for passengers. The five year build included a major track upgrade, a new rail underpass on the approach to the station and platform widenings and extensions, all of which means 30% more trains can use the station than before.

Balfour Beatty contributed extensive track remodeling, civil engineering and power upgrades of all lines east and west of the station involving 128 different track stages and nine signalling changes. Additionally Balfour Beatty installed over 40km of track and 147 new switches and crossings; as well as introducing two new lines for the Thameslink train to run independently from the other train operating companies. The value of the project was worth around £220 million to Balfour Beatty.

Mark Bullock, Balfour Beatty's Managing Director for Rail and Utilities said, 'Harnessing our unrivalled expertise in critical rail infrastructure Balfour Beatty worked alongside its partners to deliver this complex and challenging project while ensuring the station remained open throughout. All at Balfour Beatty are proud to be part of the new iconic London Bridge station; which will transform north-south travel through London and vastly improve commuter services.'

Mark Carne, Chief Executive of Network Rail, said: 'This station has been rebuilt from its Victorian foundations upwards, while still providing a service for the 48 million people who use it every year, to be delivered on the very day we said we would five years ago.

'This is a station that represents a transformation in passenger experience, a catalyst for economic growth and a world first in the use of Digital Railway technology demonstrating our vision of the future.

'I give my thanks to the great people and great teams behind this fantastic project, as well as to our customers for their patience and understanding during these major works.'

- ENDS-

Image: Balfour Beatty Thameslink Project Director Chris Ottley (Pictured 3rd from left) with Prince William the Duke of Cambridge

Media enquiries to:
Will Swan
Balfour Beatty
+44 (0)207 963 2150will.swan@balfourbeatty.comwww.balfourbeatty.com | follow us @balfourbeatty

All non-media related enquiries should be directed to +44 (0)20 7216 6800 orinfo@balfourbeatty.com

Notes to editors:

• The Government-sponsored £7 billion Thameslink Programme is an ambitious 10 year programme to transform north-south travel through London. It is delivering new longer and more spacious trains running every 2 - 3 minutes through central London in the peak, improved connections to more destinations on an expanded Thameslink network including Cambridge and Peterborough and more robust tracks and modern signalling using digital railway technology to make journeys more reliable. The Programme has also completely rebuilt stations at Blackfriars and London Bridge. The Thameslink Programme is being delivered in partnership between the Department for Transport, Network Rail, Govia Thameslink Railway, Southeastern and Siemens.
• Balfour Beatty (balfourbeatty.com) is a leading international infrastructure group. With 28,000 employees, we provide innovative and efficient infrastructure that underpins our daily lives, supports communities and enables economic growth. We finance, develop, build and maintain complex infrastructure such as transportation, power and utility systems, social and commercial buildings.
• Our main geographies are the UK & Ireland, US and Far East. Over the last 100 years we have created iconic buildings and infrastructure all over the world including the London Olympics' Aquatic Centre, Hong Kong's first Zero Carbon building, the world's biggest shopping mall in Dubai, the National Museum of the Marine Corps in the US and the Channel Tunnel Rail Link.
• Balfour Beatty is one of the UK's leading rail infrastructure suppliers. From feasibility studies, planning and design through to implementation and asset management, we provide multi-disciplinary rail infrastructure services across the lifecycle of rail assets. Our expertise covers electrification, track, power, civils, specialist rail plant, railway systems and technologies.
• Balfour Beatty also provides a comprehensive range of on-track machines for track geometry improvements and general track works. Our fleet of modern 'Tampers' consist of plain line machines and switches & crossing units. Along with our expert operators and support staff these machines ensure outstanding track quality for our customers.
• Balfour Beatty's current portfolio of rail projects includes the £170 million Track Partnership for London Underground, the £50 million project for track re-modelling of London Bridge and Crossrail projects including the £130 million Abbey Wood station, the £110 million Whitechapel station and the £70 million station at Woolwich. Its most recent contract awards are for the supply, operation and maintenance of 'On Track Machines' or 'Tampers worth £115 million for Network Rail; and, the operation and maintenance of Network Rail's fleet of track maintenance machines, known as 'Stoneblowers' for more than £40 million; and, the five-year 'Reactive Building and Civils Contract' by Network Rail worth up to £50 million over a five-year period for the reactive aspect of the contract.
• Balfour Beatty's Rail Innovation Hub in Derby employs a team of the industry's leading technical experts and engineers dedicated to research, develop and test the latest, ground-breaking technologies and working practices in the UK and overseas. These include High Speed Measurement Systems and Automated Inspection and Monitoring Systems which enable track maintenance to be done on passenger trains at high speed, allowing early fault detection and significantly reducing costs.
• Omnicom Balfour Beatty provides a complete range of infrastructure monitoring solutions; these range from trackside, dedicated monitoring trains, RRVs, to the state of the art in service train solutions. Omnicom Balfour Beatty's software solutions complement our hardware products and are compatible with other third-party systems and provide infrastructure owners, maintainers and operators with information to help create informed decisions in real-time or for long terms strategic planning.