Shuttle Wagons Project Plan Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Shuttle Wagons Project Plan - Essay Example After completion, the tunnel is meant to join the United Kingdom and France. It will be the longest underwater tunnel in the whole world with a total length of 50 kilometers. The tunnel is inherently a rail transport system, which will enable Eurotunnel, to avail a dive-on shuttle service for the normal road vehicles between the two terminals. Project background Eurotunnel contracted TransManche Link (TML) for the building of the channel tunnel. TML then subcontracted different roll shock manufactures for the buildings of the Shuttle Wagons. The project had a tight timescale and had heavy liquidated damages that were associated with the delays. This paper looks at the design and the manufacture of the transport vehicles called the Shuttle Wagons. The first half of the passenger shuttles comprises a locomotive, twelve single deck wagons for the coaches, the off-loaded wagon, and a loader wagon. The other half is comprised of a similar design but has a two-tier system of wagons for car s. Each single deck is designed to carry a coach while the double deck wagons are designed to carry a maximum of five cars in every deck, which adds up to ten in a single wagon (Harris, 2006 p32). The wagons were designed to enclose the passengers in the vehicles providing a fire resistance for thirty minutes. The reason for this design was that the journey from one terminal to another takes about five minutes. If, by chance, a fire started at the time the shuttle enters the tunnel, the fire would be contained up to the time the shuttle will reach the other end of the tunnel. The policy of keeping the passengers in the shuttle until the wagon reached its destination enables any residual incident to be dealt with in the specially designed emergency siding (Harris, 2006 p67). There was the need to have a drive on and off system that required the unrestricted access to the entire length of the twelve wagon units during the loading and the unloading process. The design concept also requ ired each wagon to be self-contained with a fire resisting enclosure for the whole journey; it was essential to have fire shutters at the end of each wagon. Identification of project management related issues The design parameters became a challenge and had to ensure that there is minimum protrusion into the wagon in practice. The design also had to incorporate pass doors through which passengers were expected to evacuate in case of emergencies like a fire outbreak, it has a minimum of 30 minutes of fire resistance and could withstand the pressure regime of the shuttle passing along the tunnel. The shutters also had to have a minimum leakage rate to maintain the least fire extinguishing concentration of Halon within the Wagon (Harris, 2006 p67). The major aspects of the design operation and construction of the channel tunnel required the approval of the intergovernmental commission. The major focus, at the beginning of the project, was on the safety, security, defense, and the envir onmental issues. This shows that at first the design parameters were not certain during the designing phase (Harris, 2006 p45). Partly in the middle of the project, it became emerged that the design changes