What did civil engineers ever do for us?

Ahead of the Institution of Civil Engineers’ 200th birthday in 2018, TheBusinessdesk.com meets some of the North West engineers behind Britain’s infrastructure. Part five: engineering the railways.

The Ordsall Chord is the centrepiece of Network Rail’s multi-billion-pound investment in rail infrastructure in the North of England.

Weighing in at approximately 4000 tonnes of steelwork and enough concrete to fill just under six Olympic-sized swimming pools (15,000 cubic metres) the Ordsall Chord will, for the first time in history, link Manchester’s Oxford Road, Victoria and Piccadilly stations.

With all major infrastructure projects there are countless people involved from all areas of the industry, and the Ordsall Chord is no different. It has promoted a culture of collaborative working among the different organisations and cultivated an environment where innovative solutions to the immensely complicated project have been developed.

Meet Jason Hyde, one of the engineers who has been involved in the design of the Ordsall Chord. Born and bred in Manchester, Jason holds a BEng in Civil Engineering from the University of Manchester and an MSc in Structural Engineering from the University of Salford.

He was an ICE Quest-sponsored undergraduate partnered with Mott MacDonald, and he’s been with the same company ever since. During a decade of work in the industry, Jason has been involved in several major infrastructure projects as well as some smaller-scale projects across the UK and Europe.

Before starting work on the Ordsall Chord, Jason completed eight months of design and 18 months of site work on the phase two extension of Nottingham Express Transit. He was the lead designer for the detailed design of the Queen’s Medical Centre Viaduct, a 500-metre pre-stressed concrete beam and slab bridge, with a signature steel bow-string arch. He was then seconded to site as the structures design representative and was responsible for interfacing with the contractor across 13 new bridges in Nottingham.

On the Ordsall Chord, Jason has been heavily involved with the civil engineering design of several of the new structures including a new steel footbridge and the cascade (the weathering steel centrepiece for the Ordsall Chord).

The project has involved the promotion of collaborative working across all parties, compliance with BIM Level 2 and innovation in the delivery of the design.

The design team has worked closely with the fabrication team to co-author design/fabrication models with the aim of reducing the amount of drawings that were produced. The team took a step further and delivered the design of the steel footbridge to the fabrication team without any drawings – understood to be the first time in the UK that a bridge has been delivered in this way.

Jason is one of those people who gets involved in his profession beyond his day job. In addition to his day-to-day duties as a civil engineer, Jason is Mott MacDonald’s Western Divisional BIM Champion, [responsible for the implementation and development of BIM].

He’s the Junior Vice-Chair for ICE North West and was the IStructE’s 2016 North West Young Structural Engineer of the Year. He is also a member of the Executive Committee of the British Group of the International Association of Bridge and Structural Engineering (IABSE).

So what’s next for this up-and-coming civil engineer?

He replied: “Having spent a decade in the world of bridge design and refurbishment, I’ve decided to broaden my skills and have recently decided to change discipline and join the light rapid transit team in Mott MacDonald.

“I’m currently working on projects for Transport for Greater Manchester and I’m coordinating the design for the redevelopment of a Metro depot in Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

“I’m rapidly learning the details of a new discipline and applying the skills I’ve developed in bridge engineering to my new discipline. It’s a fantastic opportunity to expand my skill set and further my development into a well rounded civil engineer ready to take on the challenges of the future.”

Next week in the final piece in our What did civil engineers ever do for us? series, TheBusinessdesk looks at what civil engineers did for Cumbria after Storm Desmond.

Ordsall Chord

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