- March 18, 2025
If you’ve ever taken a train journey into the heart of England’s cities, then your journey will have passed over one of the many hundreds of railway arches located under viaducts and bridges.
AW Rail have for the last year had several teams of brickwork specialists tasked to repair and renovate many of these arches across the rail network, those situated on the approach too and within the City of London.
These arches over the years have been used for many different occupations and accumulations of dust, grime and more present a particular challenge to our teams repairing them.
We’ve been using some innovative air fed technology to prevent our staff breathing in this contamination whilst they work often at height and in difficult circumstances. The scope of this work is considerable, and we have had several 3-man teams working 10 hour shifts during the week for the past year.
During this time, we’ve instilled into our teams a positive approach to safety (as we do on every project we are involved in) and after a quick tally we have realised that 26,400 man hours of work have gone into this project so far which has resulted in ZERO to A&E We’d like to thank all those involved in this project for achieving this.
A rail history fact:
Especially as we have worked on the arches at London Bridge approach – which started construction in 1834 and consumed over six million bricks with 400 navvies using more than 100,00 per day, this in turn caused a shortage of bricks for other building activities in London at the time. All the bricks used were made at Sittingbourne, Kent and transported by barge to site.
Fast forward to 2022 and like many others in the industry we are now facing a shortage of brick supply in the UK and having to source material from further afield to complete these works – sadly transportation by barge is no longer possible.
We strive to continue with our Zero to A&E policy – ongoing training and developments are key to our companies success
