Come on England!

Ah, sorry GTBE, beg pardon. Oh well, perhaps my repeat posting will be of use/interest to recent joiners who haven't worked their way right through the thread. 

Abstract no.5

Abstract no.4

Abstract no.3

Abstract no.2.

Subject: Signage and weather ingress on the Transfer Deck

Further to our upthread discussions on these issues, a quick browse on the NR^» (Network Rail - home page) site has thrown up their Guide to Station Planning and Design. It's very good, and I commend it to interested posters on this thread. It's at: www.networkrail.co.uk > Property & Retail > Improvements > Stations (sorry, my browser refuses to let me copy/paste links).

I've attached here (and on my subsequent 4 posts below) some abstracts I've made of pertinent pages from the Guide. It'll be interesting to read your thoughts on them as they relate to Reading.   

I'm very impressed by the ambition and scale of what's to be done West of the station, and actually the scale of that has only just struck me with a re-read of the Planning appn and its component plans and elevations. Long-standing and/or technically-qualified posters on here may be very familiar with what's proposed/underway, but for those of you who aren't (like me) I've just posted on the Flickr Reading re-modelling thread the Planning document which shows a plan view of all of the upcoming viaducts, bridges, dive-unders etc, which includes abstracts showing fairly crudely-rendered perspective views of all of them. [Apologies: I can't post the link here because, for some reason, my browser has recently decided to stop letting me copy links].

Again, you may have already had this discussion here (and apologies if so), but recent new-joiners may be interested to know that:

• There is to be a main viaduct 1.8km long, and 9m high at its highest (over Cow Lane)...
• ...and also a viaduct on the new Festival line which, I think, goes under the main viaduct

Spectacular stuff.

I'm sure that if I haven't got this right someone will put me straight.

Thanks Ollie. Done.

Jeff

Ollie,

I've just emailed you a note about the signage concerns but got an auto-message back saying that your mailbox was full - and it was only a 354kb pdf, honest! Clear down your box and I'll se-send. I've also tried to post it here as an attachment but at 354kb it's above the 256kb size-limit.

Jeff

Ollie,

That's an excellent offer, thanks very much - I hope FGW^▸ (First Great Western) formally acknowledge and appreciate how well you represent them on here, as that would reflect as well on them as it does on you. 

I'll bash something together today - it'll largely be a bulletised cut'n'paste of the signage-related concerns from here but it should be enough to contribute something useful into your colleagues' thinking tomorrow. Do let us know if there's likely to be an opportunity to feed in any other themed thoughts/concerns about RSAR at any other point.  

Thanks Ollie and John R,

Both encouraging responses. 

Thanks SWR^» (South Western Railway - about),

Yes, I'd already been thinking that the best thing to do would be to direct our concerns to NR, as it's of no help to anyone if I/we just chunter on about them here, but I've been waiting to see whether there were any posters here who are in relevant positions at NR. I'll leave it for a few days to see if anybody picks it up; if not, I'll then call/email NR.

Alternatively, perhaps the the senior managers at FGW^▸ (First Great Western) that Oxman refers to may wish to comment and/or direct their NR colleagues' attention to it. If so, I'd direct them to start reading from either p.95 (paul7755's post #1420 about the confusing signage above the lifts at platform level) or my own post #1435 on p.96 (about the signage on the Deck). Thereafter they'll also see other posters' concerns and pics about weather ingress, buckets, slip-hazard signs etc.     

GTBE, thanks for your comments at replies #1620 and #1627.

I too thought Stuving's opening post was very insightful and helpful.

FWIW^▸ (for what it's worth), I had my first experience of the Transfer Deck yesterday (Sun 14 April), thanks to the kindness of the gateline operators who were happy to indulge my request to "...just have a look around". And I have to say that I was underwhelmed, and also that all of my concerns about the signage, based on my just having seen the pics on Flickr, were confirmed when face-to-face with the reality. I witnessed people drifting around looking utterly puzzled, and then gravitating to the lift pods to try to gain some of understanding of where they were in this huge space and where they needed to go for their train. And interestingly, my companion, acting as a sort of "control group" in this experiment (ie she was coming to the subject absolutely fresh, having never been to Reading Station before and having never read any of the postings on here or seen any of the pics), found the Deck very disorienting and bewildering - and she's a very seasoned and confident solo traveller. One of her spontaneous comments was exactly what I'd said on here a week or so ago, ie that the lift pods need to have huge numerals on them to signpost the way to the relevant platforms, and also that the tops of the stairs/escalators themselves need to signal their platform numbers more clearly. She also added that the CIS^▸ (Customer Information System) screens need to be triple the size.

I won't continue to bang on here about the Transfer Deck, whether about signage or weather ingress, but personally I really do think that NR^» (Network Rail - home page) need to make some improvements, and soon. I may be completely wrong, and I apologise to any of the involved professionals who may be reading this, but it just feels to me that the voices of the civil engineering and/or QS elements of the design team pre-dominated over those of the architects. In short, the Deck doesn't appear to have been designed to accommodate how people actually behave.

I have to say that I'm a very reluctant nay-sayer about this, as I was as keen as everybody else on this site to be a cheer-leader for this massive and otherwise extremely impressive project, but I'm just so disappointed that what could have been an absolutely superb Deck has fallen short because of simply poor thinking. Of course, the Deck is an improvement on the narrow footbridge we had before, but surely if you're giving yourself a blank slate on which to work, as NR did here, then you get it absolutely right, first time - instead, I feel that we've ended up with something which falls far short of what could have been provided. And I'm not thinking in terms of absolutely world-class iconic architecture, which obviously comes at a price, I'm just thinking of something which functions properly.   

EDIT: and I was absolutely astonished to see the mesh-screens, rather than glazing, in the clerestories! What was the thinking there?      

Yes, the D&A statement does explicitly refer to natural ventilation. That's obviously got to be a good idea, in terms of minimising CO2 production by obviating the need for more electricity generation, but the actual implementation of that fine principle has been woeful - surely, the primary requirement of any building, whether it's ventilated naturally or mechanically, is that it has to be weatherproof. Entirely predictably, the Transfer Deck is not.

I did have grave misgivings about the design when I saw it in the plans/elevations submitted for Planning but decided not to whinge about it here as that would just seem negative, though I did express my concerns recently about the apparently poor  navigability of the Deck and the total inadequacy of the signage. However, I think Grimshaw (the architects) and Network Rail (the clients) have really embarrassed themselves by producing a building whose functionality and fitness-for-purpose simply do not look like they have been properly thought through at all. I remember seeing in the Environmental Statement (I think) that the design-decisions about local wind conditions were based on readings taken at the Met Office weather station in Bracknell! Unbelieveable! This station was a long, long time in the planning - surely someone could have said at some point: "hang on, this section of the GWML^▸ (Great Western Main Line) is oriented exactly East-West, in a country with prevailing westerly/sou'westerly winds, and the existing station already suffers from having those winds howling directly through it; before designing the new station, perhaps we should therefore install anemometers on the existing building for a few years and take site-specific wind-readings to help inform our decision-making".

The idea of good architecture is to anticipate and design-out really basic problems such as potential weather ingress before one gets to Planning and certainly before getting to detailled design-drawing stage; dealing with them retrospectively in the way that NR^» (Network Rail - home page) are now having to, ie with mops/buckets/slip-hazard signs, is just appalling, and makes them look amateurish. Which is a terrible shame, because this has otherwise been an incredibly impressive project so far. 

I have to say that the more I've read on this thread about the RSAR project, the more I've understood that it was west-of-Reading track-led, and that the re-configuration of the station was largely a necessary consequence of that (though I do acknowledge that the anticipated doubling of passenger numbers through Reading in the period to 2030 was also a massive driver); it does, therefore, seem to this layperson that the station re-design was almost an afterthought (I exaggerate, of course, for effect).

I'm so puzzled by how this weather-ingress situation was allowed to get to this stage, ie allowed to get right through many design iterations, and through the construction process when there was terrible weather, to the point that the building fails within a week of commissioning, and customers are posting photos of puddles and buckets. All the actors here are normally first-class at what they do: Grimshaw, Hotchieff/Costain, Network Rail, all excellent - so how has this been allowed to happen? How did this problem get through their respective (and joined-up) quality-assurance processes?

We all know that architecture/construction is always a compromise between aspiration and cost, but surely making your building weather-proof must always be on the "must-do" list rather than the "nice-to-do" list?