Issue 10 - Autumn 2006

Pennine Gains Ground through Milton Keynes Office

The rise of innovative ground improvement specialist Pennine continues apace with news that our Milton Keynes office has won 23 contracts - worth a total of £762,000 - in the last three months alone.

Marketing manager Stan Mimms, who divides his time between Milton Keynes and Pennine's Bacup head office, said: "The Milton Keynes team includes two full time geotechnical engineers, David Roy and senior engineer Roland Pollard.

"They are able to deal with projects right from the initial budget stages through to contract agreement, occasionally attending site meetings. This end-to-end approach is obviously favoured by our clients who benefit from having a single point of contact in developing their project plans."

Among the most recent contracts won by the Milton Keynes office were St Neots, Cambridgeshire, Enfield and Folkestone - all completed in October on time and to budget.

The St Neots job was a £96,000 project to prepare the way for a warehouse distribution centre 50m from the A1. Working to a tight two-week deadline, we inserted 4,031 top feed stone columns to average depths of 2.2m.

In the London borough of Enfield, we completed a £105,000 ground improvement programme for developer Fairclough Homes. Working alongside our sister company Stent, who were carrying out piling on the same site, we inserted 1,800 vibro stone columns to depths up to 6.5m.

And in Folkestone, we used one rig to install 1,316 vibro stone columns in a £35,000 contract preparing for a new motorway services at Junction 11 of the M20.

Railway Job on Track with Help from Pennine

The arrival of one of the biggest cranes in the UK at an embankment on the edge of a railway line in Hartlepool raised urgent load bearing issues for Balfour Beatty Civil Engineering.

The giant 1200-tonne crane, which can lift weights of up to 200-tonnes was needed for the construction of a new railway bridge.

But the soft peaty ground beneath it was unable to support the crane and its load without improving the strength.

Within a week of making the decision to use vibro concrete columns (VCCs), the Pennine team arrived on site to insert 48 VCCs into the ground. Twelve were inserted into four bases at depths ranging from 5.5m to 8m.

Three days later the job was complete, aided by a concrete mix designed to accelerate curing prior to the crane being erected.

The team's swift and efficient intervention helped ensure that construction of the bridge was completed on time and to budget and the site was handed back to client Network Rail.

For further information on the use of VCCs click here.

CPD Presentations

Professionals seeking to know more about ground improvement and piling techniques and their application for different projects, can now benefit from two CPD presentations offered by Pennine.

• The Ground Improvement CPD presentation explores the technical, construction, design and quality control aspects of various solutions along with case histories.

• The Penpile CPD presentation looks at our auger displacement piling system and describes the benefits: economical with virtually no spoil and low levels of noise and vibration during installation.

For further information or bookings contact Elizabeth Thompson on 01706 877555, email elizabeth.thompson@pennine-group.co.uk or visit our website at www.pennine-group.co.uk.

Small is Beautiful for Brownfield Sites


The Tardis rig may not be a Dr Who time machine, but it can help propel brownfield sites to a brighter future.


Taylor Woodrow's Chantry housing development in Radyr, near Cardiff is a little restricted even for a brownfield site.

The former goods yard with working railways on two sides and the river Taff on the third - plus housing beyond these boundaries - put it's developers in a potentially tight spot.

Fortunately for Taylor Woodrow a solution was at hand in the form of the Tardis - a highly flexible and very small piling rig.

Weighing in at just 22 tonnes and measuring a mere 2.84m high, 2.6m wide and 9.7m long, this Pennine patented rig can be used anywhere where headroom is severely restricted, such as near powerlines or inside existing structures.

Graham Ellery, senior geotechnical manager at Pennine said: “The Tardis' name is an acronym for Telescopic All-purpose Rig for Displacement Implements. Also, we think it's unlikely power to weight ratio does have a touch of Dr Who about it”.

The Tardis can be used with any of Pennine's techniques, again providing the perfect solution for brownfield sites where the existence of old foundations often rules out the use of precast piles.

At Radyr the difficult ground conditions made the site ideal for vibropiling as the technique’s strength is its ability to fill the hole according to the condition of the ground – it’s not piling in the sense of transferring the load to solid ground beneath, it’s ground improvement.

With the continuing need for brownfield development, access difficulties and site constraints are becoming increasingly common for developers, resulting in a trend towards smaller machines.

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