Beaulieu Park Station
Beaulieu Park is a new station being built on the Great Eastern mainline northeast of Chelmsford city centre adjacent to junction 19 of the A12, the Boreham interchange. This will be the first new station on the Great Eastern mainline for over 100 years.
The railway is busy with longer distance traffic from Norwich and Ipswich and more local traffic from the Essex and Suffolk coastal towns. Finally, there is significant rail freight primarily from the port of Felixstowe. All this is handled by a two-track railway albeit with substantial bi-directional signalling. So, building and operating a new station was not going to be easy, indeed one of the constraints is the need not to reduce freight capacity or to add time to freight train journeys as a result of the new station.
The context
The northeast of Chelmsford is subject to much wider regeneration and development of the Chelmsford-Braintree corridor with plans for up to 14,000 new homes, a new north-eastern Chelmsford bypass, as well as new schools, retail, and leisure facilities. Support for the new station came from the Chelmsford City Council and Essex County Council partly because of the cramped nature of the city centre station in Chelmsford which, with 5.7 million annual users in the year ending March 2023 is one of the busiest two platform stations on the national rail network according to Office of Road and Rail (ORR) data.
The city centre station is on an elevated section of railway and has limited parking, or even drop off, for rail travellers arriving by car. The new north-eastern bypass will make access to the new station from surrounding towns such as Braintree much easier and relieve congestion in Chelmsford city centre. Beaulieu Park thus became a station to serve both a significant residential expansion of Chelmsford, provide a wider local catchment, and reduce congestion around the city station.
As with many such ideas the project has had a long gestation. Outline planning permission was granted in 2013 but it took a further eight years to get funding in place. As a result of requests from the City and County councils, The Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities is providing £218 million of funding via Homes England while the housing developers, Countryside and L&Q, together with the South East Local Enterprise Partnership, are providing a further £34 million. This allows both Beaulieu Park station and the new Chelmsford north-east bypass to be constructed.
The Chelmsford north-east bypass links to the Boreham interchange on the A12 and is fundamental to gaining access to the new station. The funding was in place by June 2021 which enabled final designs and physical work to commence. The funding source means the primary client for the station is Essex County Council with Network Rail overseeing the construction and railway facilities. Final design was contracted to Murphy. A second contract for the physical construction of the station was also awarded to Murphy in September 2023 at a cost of £124 million.
The site of the new station has various constraints as a result of past use of the land, quarries and historically protected parkland, as well as future plans, and thus could only accommodate a relatively short section of expanded railway. Extensive modelling to demonstrate the effect of placing a busy new station on rail traffic capacity and running times, especially of freight traffic, was conducted. This concluded that the station should be built with three tracks and platforms, an up and down main, and a central loop, all of which will be bidirectional. The current line speed of 100mph will be maintained on the up and down mainlines, while the central loop line will be subject to a 50 mph linespeed as will the associated point work. The three platforms will each be 250 metres long and thus capable of handling 12-car trains of 20-metre carriages or the equivalent. Canopies are provided along two-thirds of each platform.
The station buildings on the downside of the railway involve significant ground works to prepare a level site supporting ease of access. There will be an Access for All (AFA) footbridge equipped with lifts as the main means of gaining access to Platforms 1 and 2 and a secondary means of escape (SME) footbridge toward the country end of the platforms. The station will have bus interchange, taxi rank, drop off zone, and cycle parking in addition to a 243-space premium car park which will be operated by Chelmsford City Council. There will be another 462-space car park to the east of the station, situated beyond land which needs to be safeguarded for the future North-East bypass. This car park will be provided with pedestrian access.
Station facilities will include ticket vending and gate line, general and accessible toilets with baby changing facilities, waiting areas, and catering and retail outlets. The scheme has been designed to minimise the impact of the station on the new parkland setting to New Hall, a Grade I listed building surrounded by a Grade II registered park and garden. This has restricted the height of the station building. Indeed, the highest part of the station is the AFA footbridge.
The station building itself is intentionally different from other stations in its design. Essentially, the building comprises a larch glulam roof – that is, an overall roof constructed of laminated and glued larch wood – supported on independent pillars, with all the internal structures including retail outlets and office accommodation being free standing within the space provided.
Staging the construction
Building such a station on a busy and critical mainline would either mean taking many short duration possessions of the railway or finding a way to keep the railway open while construction took place. Unsurprisingly, the latter was the chosen option leading to the realignment of the final railway in several substantial stages of work. The first stage required Murphy to build up the land on the downside of the railway prior to construction of a realigned down line and its platform (3) and the loop line and its platform (2). This entailed moving around 80,000 tonnes or somewhat over 40,000 cubic metres of material to level the land.
During this period, rail traffic continued uninterrupted on the existing up and down lines while the substantial work took place on this stage of the project. From a permanent way perspective, the new alignment for the down main and loop line and associated platform faces were built including the installation of eight point ends to provide full bidirectional flexibility for the final layout. All works that would otherwise require engineering possession of the railway were installed to avoid later disruption to train services. The overhead line equipment for the revised alignment was prepared, new signalling location cases and relocatable equipment buildings, together with the new signals and train detection apparatus, were installed. This work was completed during 2023.
Over Christmas 2023, the project entered its second stage when a full possession of the railway slewed the old down and up lines to connect with the new down line and loop line, respectively, and disconnected the former alignment. Being an electrified railway there are also the associated changes to the overhead line equipment which was upgraded through to Chelmsford station. Down trains now run through the station via what will be Platform 3 while up trains run via the loop line through Platform 2. At this stage the signal interlocking has not been altered so the points are clipped and padlocked out of use. Thus, although the actual signals and train detection equipment for the new track are in use, the interlocking is still configured to regard this as part of the original up and down mainlines. This enables stage three, the construction of Platform 1, including canopies and the final alignment of the up line to be completed again without the need for possession of the railway.
This part of the work is currently in progress and includes, as was the case for the other platforms, installation of preformed platform faces with associated backfill and top surfacing of the platform. In due course, stage four will reconnect the new up line to the rest of the route thus delivering the final three platform station.
The GE mainline in this area is signalled using Solid State Interlocking (SSI) controlled from Liverpool Street signalbox using an Integrated Electronic Control Centre (IECC). Consequently, many of the signalling changes relate to amendments to the data configuring the system although of course there is additional lineside equipment to drive new points and signals as well as amendments to train detection sections. It is at this stage that the main signalling alterations will become active and thus require robust testing and verification.
When stage four is complete the railway will revert to a bidirectional 100mph route on the up and down lines with the loop having a linespeed of 50mph in both directions. This is planned to occur in late December 2024. Upon opening, the opportunity will be available for the train operators to enable one train to pass another that is running out of schedule; an important benefit given the two-track nature of the route both east and west.
Station building
In terms of the station building, Murphy has completed the major earthworks and drainage to prepare the site – the station shell and roof were erected during 2023. Through 2024, in addition to the creation of platform one, the station works will be completed including the access for all footbridge and the emergency footbridge both of which were due to be installed over the late May 2024 bank holiday and will result in the station appearing, at least from an external perspective, to be almost complete.
There will then be the associated lifts together with other station facilities, such as gate lines, toilets and information systems and with retail outlets to be completed some of which will involve the train operator Greater Anglia. The project team is currently aiming to complete this work together with submitting the necessary paperwork to gain approval for use during 2025.
While the station itself and immediate surrounding area is the responsibility of Murphy and Network Rail, much of the external area including access roads and the more general ‘urban realm’ around the station falls to the local authority to complete. In addition, the need for facilities such as bus routes and taxi provision has to be arranged but is outside the immediate scope of the station construction. Thus, a final opening date during 2025 is yet to be confirmed. This will be announced by Essex County Council in due course.
While Murphy have been the prime contractor for the project it involves many other specialised disciplines. The major sub-contractors have included Pod Trak for track and OLE work, Amaro for the signalling work, and DPH for the Electrical and Power works and operational communications.
My thanks to Ian Bland, portfolio manager, Network Rail, and William Ross project director for Murphy, for discussing the project with me and showing me around the site, and to Stephen Deaville, senior communications manager, Network Rail for organising the site visit on which this article is based.
Image credit: Network Rail
