HS2 unveils final designs for Moxon’s Thame Valley viaduct | News

HS2 has unveiled the remaining models of an 880m-extensive bridge created by Moxon Architects that will be pretty much solely designed with prefabricated factors.

All significant sections of the Thame Valley viaduct will be produced off site and “slotted collectively like a big Lego set”, the £100bn railway challenge has explained.

HS2 claimed the technique, which has been impressed by recent higher pace rail initiatives in Spain, would slice carbon during design by as a lot as two thirds.

The bridge will carry trains travelling at speeds of up to 360km per hour about the flood simple of the River Thame, just outside the house Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire.

Explained by Moxon as a “minimalist elevated causeway”, it will be set minimal into the landscape with the underside of the composition just 3m earlier mentioned the ground.

Consisting of 36 even spans, every single 25m-prolonged, it will be designed by assembling its modular pre-cast beams specifically from each other.

This differs from classic bridge design, which consists of securing the beams working with a concrete diaphragm which is forged in situ.

The lighter-excess weight structure is envisioned to help you save all around 19,000 tonnes of embodied carbon compared to previous layouts for the bridge, according to HS2.

The scheme’s principal contractor EKFB – a joint undertaking among Eiffage, Kier, Ferrovial and Bam Nuttall – claimed the procedure of chopping carbon started out at the first structure phases.

The Thame Valley viaduct is one of 15 bridges designed by EKFB as part of HS2’s route, which stretches from London Euston to Manchester.

The longest, the 3.4km Colne Valley viaduct, will also be the UK’s longest rail bridge when accomplished and will carry travellers among a pair of tunnels beneath central London to the 16km lengthy Chiltern tunnels close to the M25.

Not like the bridge about Thame Valley, the Grimshaw-made Colne Valley viaduct will consist of a sequence of spans of different lengths with some just about 80m lengthy.