Over £500,000 of investment into CEMEX UK’s Rail network has been completed over the summer period. The money was used to replace and extend track infrastructure at three sites – Attercliffe, Bletchley and Small Heath.

This investment was made as part of CEMEX UK’s ongoing plans to invest in its Rail operation and support a modal shift, reducing the number of truck movements in favour of more sustainable methods of transport such as trains and vessels.

The investment at each site was part of an ongoing programme to improve service or capacity.  At Bletchley, 152m of new track with a different alignment to reduce drainage issues and increase the turning circle for delivery vehicles was installed, while 330m was laid at the new depot at Small Heath as part of the new siding, alongside storage bays for efficient offloading. This site has been developed as part of CEMEX UK’s ongoing strategy to target metro markets.

Jane Walsh commented: “At Bletchley the work was carried out over a weekend to minimise disruption to customers and ensure we could continue running as many trains as possible into the site to maximise product availability. Good collaboration between Operations, Commercial, Supply Chain and Procurement to manage the outage, in conjunction with the contractor meant the work was carried out successfully and more importantly, safely, well within the timescale allowed.  There were no issues at all with customer service, and no trains were impacted.”

Finally, at Attercliffe life-expired track has been replaced with 196m of track embedded in concrete so that delivery vehicles can safely use the same area in the day as the train does at night. Attercliffe is a consistently high performing depot in our booming Yorkshire market, which recently reached the 250,000t milestone earlier than it had ever previously done. Specifically, at Attercliffe it was a real team effort with the Urbanisation Solutions, Materials and Supply Chain teams working together to keep the outage time as short as practical and in turn minimising the impact on the customer. The prefabricated track embedded in concrete (supplied by CEMEX’s Urbanisation solutions business) was chosen for this development to ensure a quick turnaround of work, keeping outages down and minimising the impact on the customer.

As a final point of note – all three sites utilised recycled RMC sleepers that had been reclaimed from the mainline. This is particularly poignant at Small Heath where the sleepers were originally made at our Washwood Heath factory before its closure, and so they have now returned to our new Birmingham site.

Mark Grimshaw Smith, Rail and Sea Manager, commented: “The summer months have provided us with the perfect opportunity to complete a considerable programme of investment into track at three of our rail depots. These sites are all very different, and spread out across the country, but they are all important parts of our rail network and ripe for development. Our use of Rail to transport our materials is increasing year on year and it is vital that we have the infrastructure in place to support this. Further investment is planned at other locations, including Dove Holes, in the near future.”