Galliford Try and Leicestershire County Council have forged ahead with their strong relationship to overcome several challenges and environmental constraints to build the Melton Mowbray Distributor Road. NCE learns about the construction of the completed road, now known as Pork Pie Way.

Diverting a river is a challenge few civil engineers encounter during their careers but doing so while working on a floodplain and managing unexpected archaeological discoveries is even rarer.

These were just a few of the hurdles faced by the team delivering the Melton Mowbray Distributor Road (MMDR), a scheme that owes its success to the partnership between Leicestershire County Council and Galliford Try.

Stretching just over 7km around the eastern side of the Leicestershire market town, the road has been designed to relieve congestion through Melton Mowbray while unlocking housing and employment growth.

As Melton Mowbray is the home of the pork pie, over 4,000 members of the public chose to name this new route Pork Pie Way.

It provides an alternative crossing of both the River Eye and the Birmingham–Peterborough railway, aiming to ease pressure on existing routes through the town centre and creating capacity for any potential future housing development.

The MMDR route consists of a single carriageway road that extends from the A606 Nottingham Road to the A606 Burton Road, crossing Scalford Road, Melton Spinney Road, A607 Thorpe Road and B676 Saxby Road to Burton Road. The scheme also built six new roundabouts on its route.

“The town’s the right place for a project like this,” says Galliford Try contracts director Jamie Missenden. “There was a lot of technical transport modelling, and with the road going in you’ll get relief in the town centre, more capacity for growth and better connections to services.”

Stretching just over 7km around the eastern side of the Leicestershire market town, the road has been designed to relieve congestion through Melton Mowbray while unlocking housing and employment growth

Early obstacles

The first winter the team got to site in 2023 showed the reality of building across an active floodplain. Saturated ground slowed earthworks and the start of the advance works programme, causing construction sequencing to be reassessed as the weather descended.

“It pretty much rained from the day we got on site,” says Missenden. “Those problems were coming in and at that point you’ve got people on the client end asking how are you going to manage this?

“The costs are going up, and your people are feeling the pressure, but you have to find the solutions.”

During the earthworks, archaeological investigations uncovered heritage assets that also delayed access to key work areas while the specialists tasked with uncovering the historical finds completed excavations.

“Archaeology was supposed to be finished by the time we hit the construction phase,” Missenden explains. “They were here for a year after we started.”

Beyond site costs, inflationary pressures also pushed costs beyond what was quoted in the business case, forcing the client and contractor to rethink how the scheme could be delivered.

The final cost of the scheme came out around £134M, which is more than twice the initial budget of £63.5M.

Collaboration

On many projects, these pressures could have caused conflict between contractor and client but the teams behind MMDR put any issues behind them and forged a new way of working.

“Nobody was going to win,” Missenden says. “It wasn’t intentional, but we just ended up in a place where the situation we were in didn’t work. Instead of talking about everything we couldn’t do, we asked ourselves – what can we do?”

This approach helped save money too. “We very quickly got our heads in a space of thinking, that we should not be looking at what we can’t do, as it was not going to help anybody,” Missenden continues.

“Let’s just focus on what we can put on the table for everybody to consider. If painting the road pink saves money, let’s tell them we want to paint the road pink.

“Through that process of openness we found a huge amount of savings throughout the construction phase.”

For Leicestershire County Council, the outlook was the same. To get the job done required a willingness to work collaboratively beyond how the council had worked before.

“This is the biggest infrastructure project we’ve ever delivered as a council,” Leicestershire County Council assistant director development and growth for highways and transport Janna Walker says.

“There was a lot of learning about how Galliford Try works and how we as a council work so that neither of us are coming at these things in an adversarial way. Every day’s a school day.”

River diversion

Although road schemes are often judged by the infrastructure the public can use when they’re finished, much of the engineering effort on the MMDR was given to features car drivers might never notice.

Principal among these was the fact the River Eye was realigned to accommodate the new road.

The diversion saw the river redirected back to its natural course and the old section also retained and used as a wildlife habitat area.

Further drainage ponds were added and designed not simply to manage runoff but to enhance biodiversity across the site. Existing wildlife habitats were also protected throughout construction while an historic railway structure was retained after surveys identified it as home to a maternity bat roost.

“How many people have ever diverted a river?” Missenden says. “I’ve worked on watercourses before, I’ve widened them and I’ve built bridges over them, but I’ve never diverted one. I’d be surprised if I ever do it again.”

The works had to accommodate an upstream reservoir, sluice gates and the floodplain the river sits on.

That first winter also created “maybe the largest temporary inland water storage facility in the country,” Galliford Try senior project manager Shaun Beales quips, when water stored in a disused reservoir, held back by a sluice, remained in place for about three weeks.

The opening of the reservoir’s floodgates could also occur with short notice, forcing the project team to think about protecting any plant in a hurry.

Galliford Try used temporary cofferdams and staged diversions to manage flows while excavating new channels. This required multiple temporary bunds and a tightly controlled sequence.

“We had a Portadam blocking off the side we were working on,” says Beales. “It ended up with three or more dams at one point.”

Beyond diverting the river, the shared walking and cycling route running alongside the road has deliberately been separated from the carriageway to create a more attractive route through the new wildlife patches.

The 48m long rail bridge which crosses the Birmingham to Peterborough line at Lag Lane was constructed with four steel girders weighing approximately 150t per pair which were lifted into place using a highly specialised crane

River and railway

Added to the pressure caused by the river were constraints caused by the nearby East Midlands Railway. Both a bridge over the River Eye and a bridge over the railway were necessary for the scheme but to construct both the team was faced with a problem in the form of a cut off, parcel of land with the river on one side and railway on the other.

Early proposals to build a temporary overbridge were abandoned. “We chose not to do it because it was going to take 14 weeks to build,” Beales says.

“We changed all the sequencing to transport material over the new bridge over the railway, which took six weeks to do, so we saved eight weeks.

“It was a significant amount of material, so we ended up settling on using the existing bridge over the river to do the piling works, which released the new bridge over the river to be constructed.”

However, the piling posed its own problems. As Beales explains, Galliford Try had to carry out extensive analysis to determine which piling rig to use for the new bridge over the river.

“We actually ended up with a larger rig because it came down in multiple pieces as it was going to put less load over the existing bridge to do it that way,” he says. “As the River Eye piles were permanently cased, they needed the larger rig.

“I think it’s one of the largest piling rigs in Europe and is normally used in London, because of the Chalk.”

The 48m long rail bridge which crosses the Birmingham to Peterborough line at Lag Lane was constructed with four steel girders weighing approximately 150t per pair which were lifted into place using a highly specialised crane. It utilised a “dig-and-replace” solution as well as reinforced concrete walls with no piles.

At one abutment the team found worse ground conditions than the geotechnical investigations had originally indicated. The project had already excavated about 3m when the poor ground appeared.

The design team went beyond the “dig-and-replace” approach and used ground improvement solution using vibro stone columns, which involves the strengthening of weak soils by the installation of densely compacted columns installed using a vibrating probe. Roughly 1,000 columns were installed in a concentrated area.

This change required a rapid redesign and approvals from Network Rail. “We managed to get a new design and installation turned around in about six weeks,” Beales says.

The bridge over the railway was the fourth and final major structure on the MMDR route to be completed following the delivery of two 15m long road bridges and the 54m long bridge over the River Eye.

Sustainability

Embedding a low-carbon design was also vital for the scheme’s success. One of the more obvious ways that the team achieved carbon savings was by using foam mix asphalt throughout the 7km carriageway and six roundabouts.

The mix used recycled planings and was produced by an on-site batching plant. The contractor estimated construction-phase savings of 2,300t of CO2 from this pavement choice.

“We’ve been looking for a similar project with a similar length of road that used the mix but we haven’t been able to find anything in the country so this is quite unique,” Beales says. “The way we constructed the road with a free edge is also quite unique, it’s more often done with curbs.”

The project also trialled Q Flow, a digital carbon-capture tool. Q Flow scanned and uploaded material deliveries and embedded carbon data, producing real time carbon reporting.

The trial reportedly produced a headline figure of about 30% carbon reduction against the project’s baseline, which equates to around 12,000–13,000t of CO2.

“Our environment team were really keen to get it implemented into a scheme and the project team was keen to use it and trial it effectively,” Beales says. “It was a trial to start with, but it worked really well, so we were willing to give it a go and it was really effective for carbon data capture. Now we’ve rolled it out across all our highway schemes.”

The new route includes six roundabouts, each requiring planned closures and close working with Leicestershire County Council to limit disruption

Roundabouts

As mentioned, the new route includes six roundabouts, each requiring planned closures and close working with Leicestershire County Council to limit disruption.

The closures ran in sequence from March to October last year with sensitive junctions timed around school holidays and other local factors.

With this level of coordination, Galliford Try was able to complete all the roundabouts within the advertised timeframe and open them early.

“The roundabouts were not on critical path but important to the sequence and delivery of the project,” Beales explains. “Getting those roundabouts in early really pushed the sequence and they were all opened early so we delivered those really effectively.”

With both Leicestershire County Council and Galliford Try celebrating the success of MMDR’s opening as Pork Pie Way in May, it is clear there’s a lot to be said around client contractor partnerships.

All engineering projects face challenges – some small, some big. Roads that traverse rivers and railways are always going to face obstacles, but both the county council and Galliford Try proved with the completion of MMDR that all obstacles can be overcome through collaboration.

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