08:08 Wednesday 8th April 2014
BBC Radio Cambridgeshire
DOTTY MCLEOD: Our top story here in Cambridgeshire this morning involves the busway between Histon and Orchard Park. It’s going to be closed this weekend for repairs after busway operators spoke to the Council. Next weekend the section from Addenbrookes’s Hospital to Trumpington will be shut for maintenance. It comes of course six months after a technical report found £31 million worth of defects that would lead to a deterioration in ride quality. At the time the County Council voted to hold the contractor Bam Nuttall responsible. Bob Menzies joins me now, the Service Director for Strategy and Development at Cambridgeshire County Council, and known as Mister guided bus I expect to many people. Bob, what exactly is this work going to fix?
BOB MENZIES: It’s going to fix a number of things. We’ve been monitoring the busway very closely. As a number of people commented there, the ride quality has deteriorated since it opened, and the joints are moving. And that caused a number of different things. And so we will be fixing where the beams have dropped. Your reporter there was talking about an inch drop. There’s actually a rubber pad should be sitting under the beam there, and we find they move out over a period of time. So we monitor that, and when they do move out we go back in and fix them. We’ve fixed a number already. We’ve fixed about twenty already, generally doing it overnight so it doesn’t disrupt the passengers. But what we’ve got through Histon, we’ve got a number of them there. We’ve got some other problems as well. Your reporter talks there about what we call spalling, where the end of the concrete .. because the beams then knock together, it knocks the end of the concrete off. It’s not a structural problem. It’s more of a .. it is a ride quality issue. If it gets too far into the concrete then it will start affecting where the guide wheels run. So we’re fixing that as well, and that takes a little longer. So we’ve taken the decision that actually on the section through Histon we’ll close that for a whole weekend. And then we can work from Saturday morning through to Sunday evening and get it all done and get it back open again. We can divert the buses round, but we do need to shut the maintenance track as well. So if there’s one message I can give people it’s don’t try and cycle down the maintenance track when it’s closed, because there will be machines there. There’ll be men working there. It won’t be safe. And when we’ve done this in the past, we have actually closed this before, people have tried to get through. It’s not safe to do it and it’s not wise to do it.
DOTTY MCLEOD: So you’ve already seen quite a lot of problems, even before carrying out these repairs this weekend. Did you expect to have to do this kind of work, less than four years into the life of the busway?
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