Power to Birmingham New Street
Aggreko provides emergency power to
Birmingham New Street Station
Aggreko, the world leader in temporary power and temperature
control solutions, provided a rapid emergency solution to
Birmingham’s New Street Station when it lost 75 per cent of its
power on the morning of Saturday April 24, 2010. Confirming its
credentials as a genuine 24/7, 365 days a year operation, Aggreko
took just over 12 hours to get the power back on at one of the UK’s
busiest rail terminals, despite the challenges of location and
accessibility.
Aggreko’s National Rental Centre first took a call from Network
Rail on the morning of the incident. The power failure was caused
by a flood shorting out switchgear equipment within the transformer
room at Birmingham’s New Street Station, which serves over 31
million passengers every year. Once all the options had been
assessed by Network Rail engineers, it transpired that three 800
kVA generators would be needed to power the station, which had been
operating on emergency power supplies - while trains were
still running, operations such as lighting, heating, shops,
destination boards and automatic barriers were out of action.
As well as the three diesel-powered generators, the project also
required the installation of a temporary fuel tank and 1.5 km of
cabling. Once equipment began to arrive on site early on Saturday
evening, the Aggreko team immediately began installing the
generators and established a safe working location for the fuel
tank, which also required filling in the small hours.
Jason Cheetham, sales engineer at Aggreko, said: “This project
shows how quickly we can react to solve major power challenges,
even at weekends. Our National Rental Centre sourced all equipment
from our local service centres and the sales and service engineer
teams worked through the evening into the early hours of the
morning to get the customer back up and running. Aggreko worked
closely with the Network Rail team, station management and the
local police force and this great teamwork across the organisations
demonstrates how complex problems can be overcome.”
Aggreko was able to provide such a rapid response due to its
ongoing contingency planning agreement with Network Rail,
which ensures all the relevant paperwork and planning is in
place, should a crisis occur.
Editors
Notes