feature
The Trent Valley Four-tracking:
A retrospective
Rebuilding of bridges
Rebuild bridges at Old Road and Trent & Mersey Canal.
Well, OK then, a retrospective shouldn't be
written until a project is finished. The Trent Valley
Four-tracking project isn't strictly finished, but it
has passed a major hurdle and deserves to be
celebrated. As we went to press last month, work
was just about to start on the major August bank
holiday closure. The National Press was waiting
for a story – not one about engineering
achievements. They were hoping for a repeat of
the problems at Christmas.
That story never materialised. Predictably they
didn't cover the story about the successful
completion of 16 days of intensive engineering
because it wasn't newsworthy. They were
preoccupied with news of more flooding across
Britain and the first rumblings of a Labour party
leadership contest - far more interesting than
the headline, "Railway work went well." So, we
thought we would redress the balance.
First though, a bit of background for those of
you who are not familiar with the Network Rail
TV4 project. The Trent Valley Four-tracking
project (TV4) was sanctioned by parliament in
two Transport and Works Orders, in 2003 and
2004, granting the necessary powers for the
work. Construction work has been in progress
since the beginning of 2005 aimed at removing
the bottleneck on the WCML between Armitage
with Handsacre and Tamworth - a stretch of
line which also includes the station layout at
Lichfield.
For years, line capacity has been significantly
restricted by this relatively short section of two
tracks with high-speed passenger trains vying
for pathways along with slower passenger
20 | the rail engineer | october 2008
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