Tunnelling & Shaft Steelwork, Merseyside

Challenge

Tunnelling work leaves no room for a steelwork supplier to guess. Shaft linings, walings, propping and gantries carry ground load and keep a bore open while people work beneath it — get the fit wrong and the consequence isn't a snagging list, it's a shut line or a flooded shaft. Main contractors running tunnelling programmes don't shop this out to whoever's cheapest that month; they want a fabricator who has done it before, understands the tolerances a shaft demands, and can be trusted to turn work around against a tunnelling programme's timetable rather than a construction site's. That short list of contractors is small, and it's the list MSR has spent decades on.

Approach

MSR's tunnelling work traces back to the MEPAS scheme — the Mersey Estuary Pollution Alleviation Scheme sewer system built under the Dock Road in Liverpool — and it has stayed a standing capability ever since, not a one-off contract. Over the years MSR has fabricated shaft linings, walings, propping and gantries for tunnelling and shaft construction, working alongside contractors including Morgan Est, Costain, Norwest Holst, Murphy, Birse, Fineturret, A E Yates, Laing O'Rourke and Mansell. The work comes out of two factories in Bootle totalling 22,000 sq ft, run by the same family that has run MSR since three former Seaforth Welding employees set it up in October 1987. Temporary works steel for a shaft has to be fabricated to that shaft's actual dimensions and delivered to a sequence the tunnelling programme sets, not the other way round — that discipline is what the work has demanded, job after job, for decades.

Outcome

That track record is why MSR gets brought back onto tunnelling and shaft jobs rather than having to bid for them cold each time. It sits inside a wider body of work — 500+ projects delivered across the UK and Ireland — but the tunnelling and shaft steelwork stands apart because of what's riding on it. Most Liverpool fabricators compete on price alone. MSR competes on the trust built from a rail, tunnelling and marine track record with Tier 1 contractors — the trust a contractor needs when the steelwork in front of them isn't decorative, and getting it wrong doesn't just cost money, it shuts a railway.