CHALLENGE
Align is a joint venture of three international and privately-owned infrastructure companies; Bouygues Travaux Publics, a subsidiary of Bouygues Construction, Sir Robert McAlpine, and VolkerFitzpatrick, a subsidiary of VolkerWessels. Their combined experience, both in the UK and worldwide, in delivering high-profile infrastructure projects safely, on time and on budget, has long established their reputation. In July 2017 the Align joint venture was awarded the C1 package of the UK High Speed 2 line (HS2). C1 consists of 21.6km of high speed rail infrastructure in a rural environment. This will include a 3.37km viaduct, 16.04km twin-bored tunnel and five vent shafts handling both intervention
and tunnel ventilation facilities.
To create this infrastructure, large portals are required to house the numerous warehouses and carparks to support the manufacturing of the tunnels and viaducts whilst roads need to be lit up to allow works for 24 hours a day.. We were so honoured to have been chosen to design and supply the lighting across this whole site. Among the many challenges were super tall warehouses, corrosive environments, extremely damp environments and external flood lighting/street lighting, with low glare and low light spill to be of a massive importance due to the surrounding residents near the project and the need to be as low light intrusion as possible.
SOLUTION
Our designers were very keen to get stuck into this one, due to the many different applications that were required. Designs were created for 45m high buildings, areas where vehicles were driving around 24/7 but required low glare so no accidents happened, large external areas where no shadowing was emitted from the luminaire, as engineers needed to be able to see the small circuit boards they were working on and also damp and corrosive areas that were operational 24 hours a day. By utilising lights across our extensive portfolio we were able to offer solutions to all scenarios whilst being extremely cost effective and kind to the environment by using the most energy efficient technology, which resulted in our client being extremely happy and in turn we have now worked with them on their temporary tunnel and viaduct lighting solutions.
