A580 east bound carriageway resurfacing, Greater Manchester

1,700t of surface course was successfully removed and replaced each night on the busy A580 in Greater Manchester.

The project scope

This project involved the planing out and resurfacing of 1,700t of surface course per night for 5 nights to resurface the A580 eastbound carriageway onto the M60 Manchester ring road.

Our Client, National Highways, provided the Principal Contractor (Octavius Infrastructure), traffic management and road marking contractors. Coordination was achieved by holding daily planning meetings.

Due to the traffic volumes at night on this busy road, traffic count surveys were carried out prior to work commencing each night. Traffic management installation and resurfacing could only proceed if traffic volumes were below acceptable limits and work was postponed on several occasions due to traffic volumes, meaning that our work took 8 shifts rather than the original planned 5 shifts.

Challenges & successes

The initial resurfacing specification was to plane out and re-lay 40mm depth of surface course. However, when work started the condition of the surface was found to be worse than anticipated so it was decided to plane out and replace to 50mm depth.

Initially, we were allocated plant parking areas on the hard shoulder at the resurfacing site. However, due to logistics and safety constraints parking at site was not deemed possible when the project started. There weren’t any suitable and secure compounds near to the site, so we utilised a compound in Manchester to store equipment between shifts. This meant we had to transport our surfacing plant 10 miles to site each night using our fleet of low loaders.