Increasing capacity within an existing depot

Steer Davies Gleave has developed a concept design for increasing the practical capacity of a depot by 33% and providing new maintenance facilities, all within the same footprint as the highly-constrained existing depot.

Steer Davies Gleave has been supporting Merseytravel (UK) in developing and delivering a strategy to replace its ageing rolling stock fleet. As part of this programme of works, Merseytravel wishes to modernise the existing depot facilities at its Kirkdale depot for efficient management of the new vehicles.

Kirkdale is situated to the north of Liverpool in a land-locked and rather awkwardly-shaped site and yet is the best-placed location operationally for the overnight stabling and maintenance of the vehicles. The site is broadly triangular in shape and is currently used for stabling and cleaning but has a train wash and wheel lathe facilities.

Merseytravel asked Steer Davies Gleave to develop options that would maximise the stabling capacity of the site, and also provide modern maintenance facilities suitable for the efficient management of the new fleet.

We began with a simple but effective process to capture the requirements of the new facility, discussing the operational and practical needs with various stakeholders in order to understand and articulate what we were to achieve.  With the requirements agreed and understood, we built up a depot design from first principles to create an option that increased the practical maximum stabling of 60m long trains from 30 to 40 units and provided modernised train wash and wheel lathe facilities.

In addition, the new layout provides within the site a new 4-track light/heavy maintenance shed plus associated stores and staff building, an Under Frame Wash with decontamination facility, and dedicated area for refilling the units with sand for additional rail adhesion.  More than that, the layout avoids time-consuming rotation of vehicles through a cleaning shed at night leading to a much more efficient and safe operation of the depot.

The potential capacity is more than is anticipated to be required for the new fleet, but may be needed to enable future expansion of the network and so we developed a phased construction strategy.  This would allow Merseytravel to grow the depot as and when the additional capacity is needed, thus making it future-proofed but cost efficient.  Client David Powell said: “SDG’s work has set out a clear vision for what can be achieved with our maintenance facilities, delivering improved productivity and a platform for growth”.