Metro and urban rail infrastructure, stations and masterplans
Given the high investment costs associated with any rail scheme, we understand the significance of providing good value for money and high performing assets that are efficient to maintain.
From route, tunnels, viaducts and tracks to trains, stations and surrounding masterplans, our leading team of multidisciplinary experts work with clients to design transformative urban railways.
Our tunnelling and rail designers ensure that schemes manage to align both climate and cost imperatives, finding ways to reduce the resources and materials used in construction. Our geotechnics expertise enables clients to build infrastructure safely and with minimal impact to structures and life below and above ground. We also bring our deep domain expertise of operational railways into the design of rail maintenance depots.
Our specialist rail architecture and design team approach every project with the passenger and user experience at the centre of decision-making. This helps ensure stations are intuitive and enjoyable to use, complement their surroundings, and are efficient to maintain. Our global experience blending function with elegance in a cost-effective manner, such as our kit-of-parts design approach, ensures maintenance and replacements remain affordable over the rail system's full lifespan.
We adopt a place-based mindset when shaping rail projects, ensuring that the route, the stations and wider developments deliver wider economic benefits, strengthen social connectivity, and regenerate urban and rural areas.
Auckland is the 40th most congested city in the world. Working in a joint venture with Jacobs Engineering, Arup created and designed a proposal for a 12km light rail network connecting Wynyard Quarter and Auckland CBD to the Isthmus, including 13 stations, overhead wire (OHW) pole installations, depot and related infrastructure, and road alignment.
Arup’s holistic approach to the proposed route selection is rooted in our development experience for the new light rail networks around the world, including Sydney Light Rail, Gold Coast Light Railand the Luas Line in Dublin.
Usually a costly manual assessment, we created an entirely new automated system to detect the clashes that consolidated existing utilities’ asset information into a common data environment. We then applied a machine learning algorithm to further reduce any manual assessments. 5183 clashes were reduced to 443, saving 790 hours engineering – a staggering saving.
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Explore
Learn more about our work and how our services can support your project:
Projects
Explore more rail projects:
Supporting Network Rail’s transformation to meet the challenges of climate change
Weather resilience and drainage asset management transformation, UK
Designing Sydney’s first integrated station development
Sydney Metro Martin Place integrated station development, Australia
Rolling stock procurement for vital new east-west rail line
East West Rail Engineering Partner, UK
Developing a low carbon train specification for ScotRail
ScotRail new train procurement, UK
Commuter and mainline rail
Across the world, Arup has been at the forefront of urban transit for more than 40 years, working with clients to unlock the transformative potential rail systems offer. Our international team helps clients to take projects from initial vision to operational reality, whether a completely new urban rail project or a major extension of an existing network.