RPS team member: Jake Clarke
When: 2020-present
Contract value: £50m+
We represent West Midlands Trains as the Third-Party Project Manager at Wolverhampton. Jake Clarke has been working on this project since February 2021 and is focussed on ensuring that the project protects WMT’s interests and that the construction phasing mitigates impact to the operational railway wherever possible.
Given our understanding of delivering works in the operational railway environment, we are ideally suited to identify and manage the impact on staff, passengers, station operations and well as working collaboratively to support the development of the local area.
Two key projects with interdependencies are the Station redevelopment funded by the council for WMT and the Plaza area redevelopment which will allow pick up and drop off of passengers through a new tram system that interconnects with Birmingham. RPS began supporting the Station project in Feb ’21 and have developed strong relationships with internal stakeholders. Particularly the station team who are responsible for operating the station. Small changes with the projects such as Staged Hoarding Movements can and do impact on staff walking routes and safety of passengers and colleagues.
An example of this is the Staged Hoarding. Originally the hoarding was set up by the Council to deliver the new station, as works finished an efficiency was identified and supported through RPS to transfer the hoarding to the new Plaza projects. This realised a number of benefits:
Efficiency with costs
Minimal Disruption to the station
Proven layout that does not impact on the station (unreasonably)
Supported a shorter overall programme which will enable rental units in the station to be let sooner increasing WMT revenue
In order to deliver the new Tram way a series of Hoarding stages have been laid out. By liaising with the property managers, Station team, Safety team and Accessibility team RPS were able to collate a series of potential issues with the plan and collate these to each of the stages. With this RPS were able to present the issues to the plaza team collaboratively and work with them to mitigate the issues before they came to fruition. Examples were:
How deliver salt in preparation for winterisation before the hoarding blocked delivery routes
CCTV and Lighting designs
Refuse collection and traffic management systems
Shortening the PRM walking route
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