Brent Cross Station is due to open in 2022. It will be the first major new mainline station in London in over a decade. It will be positioned on the Midland Main Line between existing Hendon and Cricklewood stations, enabling through journeys from Bedford to Brighton.
WSD's work consisted of modelling 2no link bridges, the main station building, upper and lower canopy steelwork along with the feature Y columns to support the upper canopies. There were also a number of secondary items within our package. End canopies and waiting rooms were desighed by others.
Tapered both in plan view and elevation
There where many challenges throughout this project, due to the complex geometry of numerous elements, mainly the Y columns and upper/lower canopies. The Y columns tapered both in plan view and in elevation. We also needed to press these Y column arms from 15mm plate into 2no "C shaped" tapered sections which where then welded together to make the arm of the column.
The vertical part of the Y columns were also fabricated from plate rather than a standard section size. A similar method of folding 15mm plate into tapered sections was done for the lower canopies. We then had to unfold the sections so the plate could be laser cut ready for folding. Just to add to the complexity, the lower canopies had to follow a radial curve of the platform. Also the main columns of the station building were fabricated from 50mm plate to allow for impact loads from a derailing train. Using the Tekla Structures model made this process of giving accurate information to the fabricator relatively simple. The same level of information would have been very difficult to provide without using Tekla Structures.
Important points or benefits:
- We acted as lead design manager. We also worked as part of the design team in weekly design meetings with WSP, who are the consulting engineers and Volker Vitzpatrick, who were the steel contractors client.
- We received .ifc files from the main consulting engineers and .iges files from the bearing supplier so we could import the bearing into our model.
