Firstco win contract with Mansell to provide cooling for the Victoria Line - 29th October 09

Firstco win contract with Mansell to provide cooling for the Victoria Line - 29th October 09

Firstco are one of many partners working with TfL on the Cooling the Tube Programme, having secured a sub-contract with Mansell to provide services for the Victoria Line Mid-Tunnel Ventilation Shaft Upgrade programme.

Extracting heat from the London Underground (LU) tunnel network is a huge ongoing engineering challenge, and TfL has established a dedicated programme team to provide solutions to prevent temperatures on deepest parts of the network from rising to unacceptable levels.

The need to halt increasing temperatures on the Underground system is an unfortunate side effect of TfL's success. Services are currently planned to increase by 25%, and new trains with increased acceleration are on order. However, even when the best of modern technology is applied, moving more customers and more trains required more energy, which in turn leads to an increase in ambient temperature. Controlling the temperature is also increasingly difficult as the ground around the tunnels has heated up over the many years since they were built.

Keeping the tube's customers cool involves developing new technologies, as well as making best use of more traditional approaches. The Cooling the Tube Programme will install new fans to double the air-handling capacity and provide much of the cooling required for the Victoria Line. Firstco will provide detailed design, development and implementation of the shaft ventilation control system. Darren Grey will lead the Firstco team, for this nine month assignment.