Episode Eight: Our next stop is…
How to Build a Railway is a twelve-part podcast series exploring the story behind the construction of the UK’s new high speed rail line.
This episode of the HS2 podcast series is all about the journey, and the destination.
Stations sit at the heart of any railway system. They receive passenger flows from the railway network and provide interchange for other forms of transport. Their design must enable this flow to be efficient and pleasant, along with connections to other modes of transport must be smooth and easily navigable.
Stations must also support the communities that host them, creating new opportunities for economic growth in and around their footprint.
Everything stations
Episode eight explores everything stations. From concept design, to using the best technologies and methods to ensure all features work in the practical scenario. Featuring:
- Laura Kidd – HS2 Head of Architecture – Laura starts the episode by documenting her experience designing stations for the passenger experience, and how each station being built the HS2 project is completely different based on location, design, and how the design will translate in operation.
- Hala Lloyd – Former HS2 Lead Architect (Curzon) – Hala dives into detail of the structure of Curzon and Interchange including the use of BREEAM to ensue all stations are designed with the most sustainable technologies.
- Adrian Hooper – HS2 Head of Engineering and Environment (Old Oak Common) – Adrian explains the use of the digital twin and headsets to walk around and test parts of the design within the practical scenario and making changes if needed.
- David Lunts – CEO of Old Oak and Park Royal Development Corporation (OPDC) – David gives an overview of the role of the OPDC, its mission in maximising the investment and regeneration opportunities around the OOC station site, and the importance of working closely with local residents and business community.
Episode Eight – Our next stop is… (transcript)
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Episode transcript
This is a transcript of episode eight of HS2’s How to build a railway podcast, first published on 18 April 2023.
Fran Scott
Hello, I’m Fran Scott and this is How to Build a Railway.
Railway stations are the vital organs of a railway transportation system. Sitting at the heart of the system, they receive passenger flows from the railway network and provide interchange for other forms of transport. Their design must enable this flow to be efficient and pleasant for passengers. Connections to other modes of transport must be smooth and easily navigable.
Stations must also support the communities that host them, creating new opportunities for economic growth in and around their footprint.
The design of stations has to meet the demands of today and of tomorrow. Not only must architects and designers create stations that support passenger use from the moment the railway launches, they must also predict the future.
There are four new stations being developed for the first phase of High Speed 2. These must fit seamlessly into existing urban infrastructure. And with four very different locations that means no two stations will look the same.
1:19
Laura Kidd
We’ve got four great stations for phase one, and they’re all very, very different. And that’s because they’re all in different places doing different things.
1:29
Fran Scott
This is Laura Kidd. She is the head of architecture for HS2 and has worked on a wide range of railway stations from North Greenwich on the Jubilee Line through to a decade on St Pancras station as part of High Speed 1. This means she has spent many years thinking about how railway stations should look, feel and operate from a passenger perspective.
1:52
Laura Kidd
In this job, you kind of become an expert without even knowing it. You know, you’re just working and learning and working and learning and you build up this expertise without even realising it.
2:06
Fran Scott
The four great stations that Laura describes are:
London Euston, where a new terminus will be built alongside the existing main line station…
Old Oak Common, a new super hub station in the North West of London, which will link HS2 with The Elizabeth Line and the Great Western Railway…
Interchange, a new station south of Birmingham, that connects HS2 to Birmingham Airport, Solihull, and the NEC.
And finally, Birmingham Curzon Street Station, a new station in the heart of the city.
Years of evaluation and planning went into the selection of these stations. Operational and engineering feasibility was balanced against passenger demand, cost, and environmental considerations. Longlists were drawn up, which became shortlists as the analysis intensified.
Once the locations were decided, the exciting part of the work could really get going.
3:13
Laura Kidd
The HS2 design vision is everything in terms of how it’s led us, as the client team, to ask our designers to deliver design. So right early on, we developed a design vision, which, as a client, set out People, Place, and Time.
3:35
Fran Scott
The design vision is a really important part of the requirement that HS2 as a client asks of the teams that it hired to do the work of designing each of the four stations. In order to select the right teams HS2 set potential designers a challenge.
3:52
Laura Kidd
And so using that people place and time, we asked them to look at the area outside of the station that they were applying for, which was not as complicated as inside the station. And we asked them to look at the areas outside the station, and give us how they would respond to that.
4:15
Fran Scott
This included vision boards, short videos and a written statement on what the vision would be for each site.
4:21
Laura Kidd
This brought the architect right slap bang into the middle of the procurement process, as in terms of being able to win or lose a job for them.
4:30
Fran Scott
At the same time the designers had to hold in mind the uniqueness of each location.
4:35
Laura Kidd
So the stations are very much about placemaking. It’s like where are the entrances and exits?
We’ve got an obligation to really look at the public realm that surrounds our stations. So it’s very much about of, how are we making these places, nice for people? you know, what, what are we providing? you know, what are we looking at in terms of greening?
5:02
Fran Scott
Through urban landscaping and pocket parks for example.
5:06
Laura Kidd
So that’s guiding the vision of the outside of the station and the public realm. But then again, then you get down to the customer and the passenger, and you think but they need to be catered for in terms of what’s familiar. And what’s the same about the stations? So I began to think about what were we going to have of common design elements, what we’re going to be those commonalities between the design.
5:35
Fran Scott
Laura calls these the touch points from common signage to toilets and lighting.
5:40
Laura Kidd
But I really felt that for us, it was more about the passenger journey and helping them because it’s a daunting task travelling, and especially, you know, on a high speed train, which is half a kilometre long, which always still terrifies me. And actually, you’ve still got to get people into that station still feeling comfortable, to get down to where they need to be to get their seat on that train.
6:08
Fran Scott
All of these really important aspects then feed into a set of design requirements that the successful design teams will use for shaping HS2’s stations.
6:18
Laura Kidd
But one thing about requirements is that they need to be evidence based. You can’t just say, I want all the stations to be red and pink, you know, because what, what’s that based on? But if you want a flooring, for instance, to be the most efficient flooring, you’ve got to actually decide what based on your experience, what do you think is the most efficient flooring? And then what evidence supports that to become a requirement for the designers when they come on board to give you that flooring that you’ve asked for?
6:53
Hala Lloyd
There’s one thing that Laura Kidd said, when I first joined, that has really stuck with me throughout was that the design vision principles that we have of “People Place and Time” recognise the fact that the stations aren’t just about what they do.
7:09
Fran Scott
Hala Lloyd was the lead architect for the Midlands stations which are Birmingham’s Curzon Street and Interchange station that will connect to Birmingham’s international airport and the National Exhibition Centre (NEC).
7:24
Hala Lloyd
But it’s about where they are. It’s about the Locate the place that they’re in, the context they’re in, and how they’re going to add to the people that are being served or are being impacted. So the local communities, whether they that kind of our users or not, and, and reflecting the time, the place, and you know, the kind of the local flavour of the area.
7:49
Fran Scott
Hala was raised in Birmingham. She has a deep understanding of the needs of local communities and is proud of its heritage. Curzon Street Station for example is in an area that is ripe for regeneration and the masterplan includes 141 hectares of development and a £1.6 billion economic uplift.
8:11
Hala Lloyd
I mean, the site itself, we’re on the threshold of Digbeth which has a very unique architectural and community character to it.
8:21
Fran Scott
At the time of the industrial revolution, Digbeth was a true growth engine harnessing the power of the Birmingham Canal to trade its world famous metalwork far and wide. This unfortunately diminished during the 20th century as industrial practices changed.
8:45
Hala Lloyd
So a lot of those very vibrant spaces and heavily industrialised spaces became abandoned and derelict and decrepit. And what we started to see in this century, is the fact that there’s now a repurposing of a lot of the areas of Digbeth towards something that’s more creative, more entrepreneurial. It’s a more start-up set up, very much about small businesses that are adopting a creative look to how they approach industry and artistic endeavour.
9:31
Fran Scott
Now HS2 provides Digbeth with the opportunity for new investment, new kinds of housing and building development for example.
Using an environmental rating system called BREEAM, the station and in fact all of the stations are being designed with the most sustainable technologies. At Curzon Street this means it will be net zero carbon in its operation and includes the use of rainwater capture and power from photovoltaic panels.
With all of these criteria to consider along with the practical railway specifications that will enable a high frequency of trains to come in and out of the station in each direction, what have the architects and designers, in this case Grimshaw Architects with consultant WSP, come up with?
10:34
Hala Lloyd
They worked really hard at trying to create an uncluttered space that would afford clear views, intuitive wayfinding through those spaces, a lot of natural daylight being bought in and the feeling of spaciousness and openness. And to do that they worked really hard with the structural engineers to arrive at something that is so elegant in its simplicity, in terms of the shallow, curved, arched roof, that span, as I said, it’s about the width of a football pitch. I mean, it’s a huge span.
11:23
Fran Scott
A typical football pitch is 68m wide. The Curzon Street station roof is 2m longer at 70m. And lengthways it runs 280m. What’s more, the roof is self-supporting meaning that there are no internal columns disrupting the flow of passengers through the station.
11:52
Hala Lloyd
And it spans with no intermediate columns that break that span, from edge to edge with an uplift, and then it forces, the forces that come off that roof and down are taken through columns that follow the form of that.
12:09
Fran Scott
The engineers behind this structure describe it as a modern interpretation of the Gothic pointed arch canopy used at St Pancras station. Every 32m a huge parabolic arch sweeps over the station with each end connected to 18 reinforced concrete columns that transfer the load of the roof down to the ground. In between the arches sit a network of triangular steel trusses described as a diagrid.
12:42
Hala Lloyd
And it’s a crisscross, it’s like a herringbone crisscross of main arches, that cross from one side to the other, add diagonals, and then in between that criss-cross then has secondary spines that follow it. And that in itself then provides over 1400 triangular shapes that become the bits that fill in the gaps. And those become the soffit. They become the outdoor external weathering. And the architects and the structural engineers worked really hard at making that shape, efficient, rationalising the number of different types that you’d get of these triangular shapes, so that out of 1400 of these that you’d need, you’d actually they I think they honed it down to about seven or nine different repetitive modules, which is incredible.
13:43
Fran Scott
This makes manufacturing of the components much easier and cost effective enabling the use of modern techniques such as modularisation and maximising off-site construction.
At the same time the design speaks to the heritage of the country’s most iconic Victorian stations.
14:02
Hala Lloyd
I mean, who doesn’t walk into the likes of Kings Cross or St Pancras, or you know, Paddington and not get, you know, doesn’t find the inspiration of that Victorian architecture. Almost cathedral-like you know, and this draws on that, it draws on the DNA of Victorian architecture. One of the things that the architects did, they actually had an overlay of the cross section of our station as designed against the backdrop of St. Pancras in a cross section, showing that the proportions were absolutely identical. And the only difference being was the ridge of the roof is that we have a shallow, gentle organic curve, whereas St. Pancras has the Gothic type of ridge. And I thought that was absolutely amazing that here we are using the best of that heroic engineering of the Victorian age, drawing on that DNA, but actually then working it through in a very contemporary 21st century approach, you know, through diagrids and offsite met and manufacturing and modularization. And I think it’s a fantastic story that people will appreciate.
15:21
Fran Scott
The other Midlands station – Interchange – has a completely different set of parameters that have driven its design. Sitting outside of the city centre it has a large area of around 150 hectares bound by major roads such as the M42, the A45 and the A452, however the station building will be smaller as there are less services stopping here.
15:51
Hala Lloyd
And primarily it’s to interchange with the services at Birmingham International rail station, Birmingham Airport, and for those visiting or coming away from the NEC.
16:03
Fran Scott
The design focus for this station has been on sustainability with Interchange going way beyond the “excellent” requirements set out in the BREEAM standards. It was the first station in the world to be considered outstanding using this assessment system.
16:20
Hala Lloyd
It’s not just a UK first, that’s a global first for any station.
16:25
Fran Scott
The design of the roof maximises natural daylight and ventilation whilst also incorporating a rainwater catchment system that can hold 150 cubic metres of water that is then re-used within the station via a network of underground pipes, lowering the overall demand for water. Energy is generated via 2000m2 of solar panels meaning that the station will be net zero in terms of carbon emissions.
Interchange station is not the only one that received the outstanding rating. Old Oak Common has also gone beyond the excellent requirement.
17:07
Adrian Hooper
From the very onset, we set out to be a BREEAM Excellent. Well, we’re on course with this with the station design and the implementation to exceed that and achieve the outstanding rating.
17:23
Fran Scott
Adrian Hooper is the head of engineering and environment on the Old Oak Common station. And a few weeks after we spoke with him, the station did receive the outstanding rating.
This new “super hub” will provide passengers a direct interchange in North West London with conventional rail services including The Elizabeth Line and the Great Western Railway.
17:45
Adrian Hooper
The key to locating the station was with the depot nature of the land and, the rail assets, it was a large piece of public owned land that had the development potential. So it had the scale available to build a high speed station, that the deep box here is over 900 metres long, 70 metres wide and 20 metres deep. So it’s an enormous space to find for that in West London.
16:17
Fran Scott
Here six 450m long platforms will sit in the vast station box with new twin tunnels taking high speed trains east and south into London Euston. Once again the station will be covered by a large vaulted roof. This time designed by architects WIlkinsonEyre with consultant WSP.
Work to prepare for construction began in 2017 when the enabling works contractor, a joint venture of contractors Costain and Skanska, began clearing over 32,000 cubic metres of former rail depot sheds and buildings along with 105,000 cubic metres of earth. The contracting team delivering the station itself is a joint venture of Balfour Beatty, Vinci and Systra.
19:06
Adrian Hooper
It’s really nice to get out on site, it was great. Today the sun was shining. And so, you know, a normal week is working very closely with the with the contractor, the contractors, designer, my team of engineers and, and the central subject matter experts within the business to accept, review and accept the designs that the supply chain is providing, making sure it meets our requirements as a as a client. So ultimately, you get the station in the railway that we all desire.
19:35
Fran Scott
Old Oak Common sits on a former Great Western Railway depot site next to the new Crossrail depot and the Hitachi depot that maintains the trains that travel to Wales and the West.
19:47
Adrian Hooper
So, Old Oak Common is the first stop out of Euston the way to Curzon Street. It will be the HS2 terminal for circa a five year period until Euston is operational.
19:59
Fran Scott
The station will house eight conventional platforms on the surface that serve the Great Western, Elizabeth Line and Heathrow Express and the six subsurface underground platforms serving High Speed Two.
Adrian explains that the design has evolved to enable more commercial development opportunities.
20:21
Adrian Hooper
As we’ve developed the design over the years, it’s now much more of a place, a real catalyst for development for the future.
So we spotted an opportunity early on that—working very closely with the Department of Transport—that if we enclose the western part of the deep structure on the high speed side, that would allow high rise adjacent site development to be built. So that’s unlocked the opportunity for up to sort of 30 storey buildings to be built next door, commercial buildings.
20:55
Fran Scott
Like the Midlands stations the exterior of the structure has a lot to thank the Victorians for….
21:02
Adrian Hooper
Well, obviously, the high speed side being underground is that there’s a vast amount of structure that the that the public won’t be able to see but that the superstructure that will be visible has a has a large glass facade, it’s an architectural vaulted, vaulted roof, which is inspired by the Victorian stations, the great Victoria stations of London, St. Pancras and Paddington, for example.
So yeah, steel glazed superstructure, with one single roof that combines the high-speed element and the conventional side of the station. So, with overbridge, to allow access to the conventional side of the station, the eight platforms on the conventional side.
21:45
Fran Scott
Unlike the Victorian engineers of the late 1800s Adrian and the HS2 team have tools from more recent industrial revolutions. Engineers today can use digital technologies to design, plan and monitor their work.
22:00
Adrian Hooper
So in the design of the station, we have the real station being built, but we also have the digital twin, which will be used for future handover for asset maintenance and includes all the information that that supports the design.
22:18
Fran Scott
Digital twins are virtual replicas of an infrastructure system, fed with the design information that can be used to generate models of the assets and network. During the operational phase these twins can be fed with real time information from sensors on the railway making them invaluable for maintenance even being able to make predictions about future work, and where and when its needed.
22:46
Adrian Hooper
So as part of the design we’ve got, we’ve got this fully 3D model, but it’s very intelligent in itself. And as part of that, we’re able to use virtual headsets and actually walk through the model and test different parts of the design from looking at it when the station is operational in 2030. And see which elements and design work and change them as needs to be.
23:12
Fran Scott
This is particularly useful with the need to stay within the budget being so critical during the design phase.
23:18
Adrian Hooper
On site, we’ve always known the known the budget element for Old Oak Common and throughout the design. The way we’ve controlled designing the budget is getting periodic cost estimates from designers and contractors and then tweaking the design where we can to bring it back into our overall budget envelope.
23:44
Fran Scott
One of the biggest contributors to cost and carbon emissions on any construction project is the use of materials.
23:52
Adrian Hooper
During the scheme design we saw that the roof steelwork was adding quite a bit to the cost of the cost of the scheme. And we looked at ways in which we could optimise the roof design, and one of the things we decided to do at that stage was build a physical model and do actual wind testing on it, which was allowed under the standards as an optimization. And that that allowed us to reduce the wind loadings and snow loadings by 20% and 40%.
24:23
Fran Scott
The financial savings from this were enormous.
24:28
Adrian Hooper
It was over five tonnes of steel out of the design and saved 6 or 7 million pounds at the time, which was a pretty healthy figure.
Another one was we realised through the dynamic passenger modelling that we didn’t need the 14 metre wide island platforms within the high speed side. 12 and a half metre wide platforms would work. So that allowed us to reduce the width of the large box that’s being constructed now.
24:56
Fran Scott
This may not sound like a major saving but 1.5m reduction in the width of the platform equated to 10 million pounds of construction costs.
And building brand new stations provides a great opportunity to bring economic regeneration to an area. And at Old Oak Common proactive steps have been taken to ensure the benefits of a new HS2 station are realised.
In 2015 the Old Oak Park Royal Development Corporation of OPDC was set up
25:41
David Lunts
The reason it was set up was because with high speed to coming to this part of West London, in Old Oak, it was felt that we needed an agency that was really going to be able to work with HS two, with the three local boroughs around the station, to really make sure that the economic growth, the regeneration, and all of the social benefits that could flow from this amazing new station, with HS2, Elizabeth Line, Great Western services all together in this Super Hub station, that those benefits were really kind of maximised.
26:19
Fran Scott
David Lunts is the CEO of the Old Oak and Park Royal Development Corporation. The development area spans 3 boroughs and covers 650 hectares which includes residential areas, big green spaces like Wormwood Scrubs and industrial areas like the Park Royal industrial estate which is home to many businesses and employs 45,000 people.
The corporations recently adopted local plan sets a planning policy framework for the delivery of 25,000 new homes and 56,000 new jobs. Creating a new urban district for London with HS2’s Old Oak Common station right at the heart.
The idea behind the development corporation is similar to what took place in Stratford over a decade ago when the area hosted the 2012 Olympics.
The goal is to encourage and guide new investment into the area.
27:20
David Lunts
So I see our job, as you know, getting out there and really selling the message that this, needs to be London’s next really big inward investment opportunity. We need to shout about it, we need to feel excited about it, we need to sound credible as we go, as we will do fairly shortly, to a global investment market to say, who wants to work with us and our local partners and stakeholders to really make this place everything it should and could be?
We’re obviously very keen to make sure that the Park Royal industrialist day and that incredible production and employment infrastructure remains very much in place. I think we would like to see that modernise over time. It’s very car dependent at the moment, there are lots of opportunities to help part roll into a more sustainable and zero carbon future. I think that’s what’s really exciting here, it’s a chance to really think about a really sustainable future settlement, which takes the best of what’s already there, but really thinks about addressing some of these future challenges in a creative way.
28:29
Fran Scott
But it’s also the OPDC’s job to ensure that it is the right kind of investment coming into the area.
28:36
David Lunts
One of our roles is to try and dial down or, if possible, even prevent inappropriate, if you like speculation. And I think one of the challenges that a lot of regeneration projects face, and we may be no different is that, you know, people see the opportunity to perhaps make a fast buck and not necessarily deliver something that’s in the best interests of local people. So that’s definitely one of our challenges.
But we’ve also set up some really, I think, quite innovative structures. So we have something called a community review group. And that is a number of people who are brought together either because they live and or work in our local area. And they review our planning applications because we are a planning authority as well as a regeneration agency. So before our planning committee meets and makes decisions, that community review group, take a long, hard look at the individual schemes, and they then supply their feedback, which is then taken into account when formal decisions are made.
And that was, as far as we’re aware, if not the first, certainly one of the first of those community review groups in the country, and it works very successfully. I can tell you that if you’re an applicant in our area, you need to take the community review group very, very serious because they take their work extremely seriously.
30:02
Fran Scott
And on of the key areas of focuses for the right kind of investment is in housing developments.
30:09
David Lunts
Yeah, very important, I mean, we have a target to try and deliver 50% affordable housing across all of the residential sites in the area. We have a minimum threshold of 35%. If you can’t deliver 35% affordable housing, you know, you have to work very hard to convince us that that’s the case through rigorous viability testing and viability reviews. We’ve managed to deliver about 41% affordable housing on the 6000 residential units that we’ve delivered so far.
30:47
Fran Scott
One of the area’s largest landowners is currently the public sector, through the Department for Transport and Network Rail who acquired an area of 70 hectares for HS2’s construction. And plans for this space have been laid out in the OPDC’s Local Plan created in June 2022
31:09
David Lunts
And that sort of settled some of the major land uses in the area. That suggests that there’s certainly the potential that there was something like two and a half million square feet of employment space offices, workplaces of one sort or another, around the station.
We also know that, you know, there’s a whole series of sites within easy walking distance of the station that are going to be largely residential. But not just residential, you know, we know that we’ve identified space for local health centres, local policing services, local community services. And we also have made very clear that at least 30% of all the land around the station, and within the local plan more widely actually, is going to be open space. So as well as a lot of homes, we want a lot of places where people can relax, enjoy themselves, including two new parks, which will be very close actually, to this amazing new Park Plaza that HS2 have designed as the main entrance space to the new station, which I’m told, is going to be twice the size of Trafalgar Square. So pretty major new amenity really.
32:35
Fran Scott
And for housing that is developed on public land, achieving 50% affordable housing is not just a goal but a requirement.
32:45
David Lunts
So yeah, I mean, if this just becomes an unaffordable enclave, it’s going to be a failed project. This needs to demonstrate that we can deliver housing that works for, you know, a wide range of incomes.
32:59
Fran Scott
Big investment is going into building these new stations, and of course in the construction phase there can bring major disruption to the local area, but in the long term they provide them with a huge opportunity.
33:15
David Lunts
London has had a series of these quite seminal kind of projects really. You know, Canary Wharf, and London Docklands, a generation ago, if one thinks about Stratford in East London with the Olympic Games and the legacy. If one thinks about what’s happened at Kings Cross, and more recently what’s happened at Battersea Power Station. I mean, these are really big game changing projects, which as I say, have changed the face of their part of London.
I think Old Oak and Park Royal is the next one of those game changing projects. And the judgement I think, we all need to make and certainly future generations that will be at Old Oak and Park Royal is, have we learned all of the positive lessons from those previous projects, and made sure that we’ve delivered something which actually puts London in a stronger place than it currently is. And crucially, my last word on this where people locally feel that this was something that wasn’t done to them, but it was done with them.
34:38
Fran Scott
For all of the stations the next major challenge is translating all of the design into construction. This means ensuring that all of the incredible achievements from the world leading environmental measures to having stations that are fully accessible to all, now have to be physically realised.
34:57
Hala Lloyd
And so the crucial bit now is that construction stage, our construction design- build contractors or our construction partners at the southern stations, have now got to meet that challenge.
35:10
Fran Scott
Laura Kidd says this should be assisted through collaboration. They may be four different stations but there is a lot that can be learned as projects take shape at different rates.
35:23
Laura Kidd
Well, what we’re actually doing now is we’re doing quite a lot of collaboration meetings between the station teams as they’re going through the design, we’ve set up a collaboration group, because it’s in their contracts to collaborate.
35:35
Fran Scott
The scale of the project means that there are a plethora of different contractors and designers working on each aspect of the station projects.
35:44
Laura Kidd
HS2 are bringing the designers together on certain topics, or certain areas where one group might be further ahead than the others. What is the learning? So for instance, we have a big session on something that might seem boring, which is always most important to customers, toilets. So you know, what initiatives are we using the toilets are setting out and all we’re doing this, you know, all of those sorts of things, and materiality. So we’re have a focus in on that. And then we can swap specifications and these sorts of things. We can look at the lighting posts. We know we all need the lighting posts, but we want them to integrate the sound system and the camera systems and things like that. So it’s like, how do we actually do that? And if one team is further ahead, we can look at them and bring them together.
36:37
Fran Scott
As the head of architecture Laura is involved in all of the four stations, but does she have a favourite?
36:45
Laura Kidd
I’m not allowed to! It’s like being a parent. You can’t say can you really? I do sometimes but I shouldn’t do. Because if you had four children, you wouldn’t say one was your favourite, and it’s not fair. And you also don’t really know until it’s delivered to you? Because what might be the favourite now might end up not being the favourite in the end.
37:10
Fran Scott
What Laura and the whole HS2 team are certain of is that what they create today will leave a lasting legacy for generations to follow.
37:19
Hala Lloyd
So it’s not about what they do, it’s about where they are and who they serve. And for me, that’s always resonated throughout. And it’s one of the things that I have found, you know, a lot of the work that I’ve put in has been around helping to realise exactly that to extract it, from whatever we’re doing, whether we’re working internally or with our external stakeholders or cross contracts. And with our supply chain, that that is what we’re addressing is what is the station doing in terms of its context, the people it’s serving, and, you know, the legacy that it’s going to leave.
These are structures, the assets that we’re leaving, will have a long term impact, you know, the expectations and lasts for 100 years more 120 years or whatever. So, you know, we’re talking, I’m talking multi-generational impact. And that’s, that’s a huge responsibility.
38:24
Fran Scott
Next time on How to Build a Railway.
38:29
Prof. Clive Roberts
We’re using much more technology. We’re asking much more of our systems. Greater speed. Much more interoperability. There’s much more expectation from passengers. Much busier!
38:39
Nassar Majothi
Generally, the idea has been “buy all the subsystems, let the contractors deliver them, and we’ll come along at the end and connect everything up and hey presto! It will all work.”
So that really is a fallacy.
38:57
Chris Rayner
In fact, the train is doing most of the supervision there on our trains. So, the driver’s really supervising the supervisory system if you see what I mean.
39:07
Prof. Clive Roberts
So what it will enable us to do is run the model in the shadow. So, imagine in the background a model that’s predicting all the time what the railway’s just about to do next.
I believe it to be perfectly feasible in the future to have close to 100% reliability.
39:47
Fran Scott
Your host has been me Fran Scott
Thanks to our guests Laura Kidd, Hala Lloyd, Adrian Hooper and David Lunts.
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