00:00 At the moment we're standing over tracks 6 and 7, platform 7, platform 6, tracks 6 and 7,
00:09 both downfast lines.
00:13 And just to give you an appreciation, when you look at this structure and you'll see it better from the platform,
00:21 just how challenging it has been to construct this above a 24/7 operational railway.
00:28 365 days of the year we've worked here, generally getting around about 4 hours a night working with a fast line possession
00:39 and maximising the use and obviously you can't work on any of these parts of these elements of the structure
00:45 when you've got an open railway.
00:47 So that has been a massive challenge for us, you can't work on the roof and the edges of the roof,
00:52 you can't have stuff dropping down onto the railway.
00:55 And to be honest with you, I think in the 3 years we've been here we've maybe had 1 or 2 incidents
01:02 where a bit of pipe or a bit of loose material has gone down, but it's been very, very well managed by Costains.
01:10 Their safety processes and procedures have been excellent, I have to say, really, really good.
01:15 Can you just talk also, just talk about how Covid affected the...
01:20 Yes, absolutely, so obviously, I mean it's funny because I came from Crossrail,
01:26 we were trying to open 9 new stations and 70km of new tunnels right in the middle when Covid happened
01:33 and one of the key roles that I undertook as project director there was to put together the recovery programme for Crossrail
01:43 as to how we would finish it with Covid restrictions in place.
01:47 It's very similar here, you had to introduce testing regimes, control stations,
01:54 constantly testing everybody on every shift to make sure you weren't bringing people on site who were infected.
02:03 The impact to the workforce was huge, but beyond that, the impact to the supply chain
02:10 and the extraordinary inflationary pressures it put on the supply chain obviously massively increased costs
02:19 and impacted the programme significantly and as you can imagine, you can just see here
02:25 the amount of material that we're delivering and supplying here.
02:29 You know, Covid wasn't a short-term thing, it went on for at least 2 years in overall terms.
02:36 We're still even now experiencing some of the effects of Covid that it's had on the markets
02:44 and the overall impact to supply chain across the board, so it has been very, very significant.
02:50 Yeah, I mean as Mark says, on the resource side, a lot of issues, however, there was a plus side, if I can say that,
02:56 because of the lack of passengers and all the works on the current station concourse,
03:00 there was a lot more the project team could do in a quicker timescale than us having to phase it.
03:05 So there was a minor plus side, you know, not that you want Covid and the pandemic,
03:09 but it probably stopped on a much smaller scale than Crossrail, as Mark said.
03:13 They probably had to put a couple of weeks to re-plan, put individual pods in, safe working practices, etc.
03:20 So yes, they managed through that period.
03:23 How long has the programme actually gone back, can you give us an estimate, when you started?
03:28 Well, it's difficult to say that because we've increased scope.
03:32 We introduced the track changes, signal changes, as Mark said.
03:36 The original timescales were for it to finish earlier this year.
03:40 So within the same year?
03:42 Yeah, it was the end of April this year.
03:46 The other major, I mean, if you can just try and imagine this concourse,
03:54 if you look up, what you can see is a very significant steel structure, okay?
04:02 And before the roof cassettes went on, these are roof cassettes here,
04:07 before that was lifted on, before the ETFE pillows, this was a completely open structure.
04:15 Because of the design requirements for both security but also for fire,
04:21 most of the connection points that you've got here in this structure require intermescent paint to be applied,
04:27 which is fire-resistant paint.
04:30 That requires four layers of paint to be applied to every connection point.
04:36 And if you were just to look here and see every one of these, that's a connection point there.
04:40 There's another one there, there's another one there, there's another one there.
04:44 That's throughout the whole structure, literally hundreds of multiple bolted,
04:50 some of them up to M50 bolts, connection points and welding points all had to be painted
04:56 before we could allow Pratus to start installing all of these cassettes.
05:01 And that's done by hand, that painting?
05:03 Yep, all done by hand.
05:05 People on cherry pickers like you've got here, dabbing in paint, going in.
05:10 You can't put intermescent paint in if the humidity level's above 95%.
05:15 You can't put intermescent paint on if the temperature's below 5 degrees.
05:20 You can't put intermescent paint on if the surface is wet, i.e. it's raining.
05:25 Guess what?
05:27 From about October last year through to April this year, it was pretty much like that for the entire period.
05:35 So there's some huge challenges for Costains to overcome to get to what you see now.
05:41 Actually a really significant achievement.
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