Project Focus: 7km of Wire Ropes for New Canary Wharf Station
Last year, we supplied and installed over 7km of Jakob stainless steel Vissline wire ropes to form the elegant and robust balustrades that surround the stunning new Canary Wharf station.
With the new Elizabeth Line station located next to the old Canary Wharf Docks, the design of the wire rope balustrades clearly echoes the nautical history of the area, with the stainless steel specification also dictated by the need for high corrosion-resistance and low-maintenance.
Installed across a series of phases, the high quality 316 grade stainless steel wire ropes were selected not only for their durability and longevity, but also their aesthetics. The Jakob ropes were all purpose-manufactured off-site, with built-in tolerances to make installation fast and straightforward.
During the detailed design phase, we proposed changing the design to incorporate Jakob’s precision-engineered Vissline thread-ends, which would make the stainless steel wire rope balustrade stronger and put less force on the end posts. As they are much smaller than traditional swaged thread-ends, the use of Vissline, together with a ‘double-turnbuckle’ arrangement, enabled us to reduce the size and visual impact of the tensioners and fixings, and allowed the ropes to be fixed to intermediate posts rather than just being fixed at the ends. This meant that rather than all of the tensioning force of the ropes being on the ends, the force is spread more evenly between intermediate posts (so if someone were to accidentally tread on one of the ropes, the force will mostly be constrained to a ‘bay’ between which the ropes are tensioned).
Our team was involved at every stage of the project, from early design support and product advice on the stainless steel balustrades for the park level, north boardwalk and promenade ends of the station, right through to product supply and installation.
