John Sisk & Son (Holdings) Ltd. enjoyed a truly amazing night at the 2018 Construction Excellence Awards, epitomised by the success of Luas Cross City in scooping top prize in the prestigious Civil Engineering category. We touched base with Sisk project managers Dave Toole and Seamus O’Brien to find out more about how this challenging project was successfully delivered by Sisk Steconfer JV.
On Saturday, December 9th, 2017, at 2pm, passenger services commenced on Luas Cross City – the €368m extension of the Green Line through Dublin City Centre north to Broombridge.
Construction works on this landmark tram project were delivered to client Transport Infrastructure Ireland by a joint venture between John Sisk & Son (Holdings) Ltd. – Ireland’s premier provider of construction services – and Portugal-based global railway construction company Steconfer.
Completing the project on time and within budget was a magnificent achievement and it was no surprise when – in a packed Mansion House, Dublin on Friday night, March, 23rd – Sisk Steconfer JV (SSJV) collected the Civil Engineering Award at the annual Irish Construction Excellence Awards ceremony.
Indeed, Sisk won no fewer than four major awards, with Páirc Uí Chaoimh claiming the overall Project of the Year Award, and beat off stiff competition to take home the BIM Excellence Award for their outstanding work on a Multinational Data Centre Campus.
The main infrastructure works for Luas Cross City project started in February, 2015 with enabling works having commenced in June, 2013. The project has delivered 5.9km of track with 13 new Luas stops taking Luas through the city centre and north to Broombridge. The Luas Cross City line will now become part of the Luas Green Line. The project was delivered within its 32-month time schedule, with more than 50% of it constructed in a live city environment.
According to Pat Lucey, Managing Director of Infrastructure at John Sisk & Son: “The Luas Cross City project has been one of the most challenging we have ever been involved with. The mantra of the project was “Keep Dublin Moving” and it took the combined efforts of all parties to deliver on that and still finish on time.” Completion of this complex infrastructural project on time and within budget was a testimony to all of those who worked on the project – 3,398 people in total with a peak of 583 in March, 2017. Going forward, Luas Cross City will serve as an impressive template for Sisk in delivering similar projects in busy urban environments.
Luas Cross City comprises 13.4km of total single line track with a weight of 1,520 tonnes. 13,600m3 on-street, concrete track bed and shoulders were poured, with total ducting and pipes under the surface amounting to 178,000m. The daily average distance walked by a foreman was 12km and the total man hours used to complete the SSJV works was three million.
One of the largest capital investment projects undertaken by the Government in recent years, Luas Cross City is a landmark project in that it has brought trams back to O’Connell Street for the first time in almost 70 years. Dave Toole, , agrees that completing Luas Cross City to programme represented a huge achievement:
“It was very satisfactory to get it done on time. Going right back to when we got involved at pre-qualification stage, the plan was to have it finished before the end of 2017 and that was achieved. Generally speaking, this is something that rarely happens in urban tram projects as there are so many elements that are out of your control, so we were delighted.”
“One of the biggest features of this was that so much of the footprint was in the public realm, so public transport needs and residents’ needs had to be taken into consideration and it needed constant marshalling.
“Also, there are so many specialist trades involved in doing a tram project and you move through so many phases across the term of the project, all of which has to be controlled and managed.”
From a Health & Safety perspective, Luas Cross City was a massive success: “Of the three million man hours that were involved, we had just one HSA reportable accident, which happened 500,000 man hours in,” reveals Seamus O’Brien,. “Thus, our rate of reportable accidents per 100,000 man hours at the end of the project was 0.03, which is very good.”
To be nominated for an Irish Construction Excellence Award came as due recognition; to win the top award in the Civil Engineering category underlined the sheer quality of the solution delivered by Sisk Steconfer JV.
“It’s nice to be recognised,” Dave admits. “We were up against some stiff competition and it’s always good to get an industry award. It’s some external acknowledgement of what we have been doing for the past three years.
“And it was a long journey. Between procurement, pre-qualifying, tendering and design, it was two years before we put a shovel in the ground. After the works were completed, there was testing and commissioning, so this project took up a lot of our time.”
Indeed, at the time of writing, Seamus was still very much engaged on Luas Cross City, working on the final closing out of some aspects of the project. Dave, meanwhile, is confident that the successful delivery of the project will open many doors for the joint venture that was put together:
“I’m looking forward to working on similar tram projects in other cities, with a particular eye on the tram project in Edinburgh at the moment,” he concludes. “We have pre-qualified and will tender for that. We’ve built a good team and hope to keep it together.
“The idea going forward would be to keep this strong team together and to use our experience and expertise to deliver similar projects. The same joint venture has been awarded Blackpool Tram project and we will also be monitoring the proposed Metro North development and will certainly have an interest in that when it is confirmed.”
John Sisk
Taken from Building Ireland Magazine, July 2018, Vol 4 No 6
