During the closure of the Lime Street Station, due to the cutting wall collapse on the 28th February, engineers seized the chance to bring forward a series of planned railway improvements by Merseytravel.
Network Rail revealed on the 9th March that they took the opportunity to start pre planned rail upgrades while the station was closed. This could mean that there will be less disruption to services when the updates were meant to be carried out later in the year. Martin Frobisher, the Network Rail London North Western route Managing Director stated that they seized the opportunity to get to work on the updates while there were no services using the Lime Street Station due to the cutting wall collapse. The quick decision making by the so called orange army will improve customer service for the passengers that use Liverpool Lime Street Station, as it will mean that they could do extra work on the station and reduce the level of disruption caused at the station.
Network Rail also managed to get the repair works ahead of schedule, even with the additional work which included detailed structural surveys of the area, demolishing a number of different buildings both within and near the station and constructing a number of under-track crossings channels. These crossing channels are used to take power cables from one railway line to another. They also provided customers with cake to say thank you to passengers using the station. Network Rail handed out more than 2,000 cakes on the re-opening day to say thank you for passengers’ patience.
The repair works to the cutting wall included removing 4,000 tonnes of material placed above the 10m cutting as well as removing the debris on the rails and repairing the damage to the tracks, the overhead wires and signaling equipment.
