Network Rail’s new station is one of the greenest ever built, using new technology to minimise its impact on the local environment. It uses a ground-heat heating system as well as locally sourced and recycled materials.  It is served by over 100 East Midlands Trains services per day, with trains to and from London every 15-20 minutes at peak times. It serves as a park and ride station for Leicester, Derby and Nottingham, reducing car use into the major cities and taking traffic off the M1.

Challenges/Achievements:

3 months before the planned completion date, it became apparent that the project had become seriously delayed, in large part due to issues surrounding road access to the station from the very busy A453.

We facilitated a schedule risk workshop with all parties present to come up with a realistic delivery programme, and worked through the issues in order to optimise delivery as early as feasible. This involved creating an open forum to discuss the current and past problems which had delayed the project and had caused uncertainty about whether the project could be delivered on time. Having cleared the air we then facilitated a discussion about the programme of planned activities, their sequencing, durations and inter-relationships, in order to identify a new base position which would allow the project to be successfully delivered to the original timescales.

While doing this we also assessed the uncertainty around activity durations and logic, and identified risks to those activities.  This allowed us to make a quantitative assessment of the schedule risks, which in turn informed Network Rail decision-making about when to announce the public opening.

The station was successfully opened on 26 January 2009, 6 weeks before the original planned date.