At the Global Light Rail Awards held in London on Wednesday, 4 October, the £104m Metro Flow project, which is the single largest project in the Government’s Transforming Cities Fund (TCF) programme, won an award for outstanding engineering achievement.

Metro Flow is part of a £198m package of investment in sustainable transport across North East England and is designed to upgrade the Tyne and Wear Metro route to South Shields. The latest work entailed converting single-line sections of a track into double track on three key sections of the Metro line to South Shields, which will improve the reliability of the network and allow the introduction of more frequent services across the network.

Projects in North-East England funded by the Government’s Transforming Cities Fund (TCF) programme also include new bus stations in Durham and North Shields, improvements to Sunderland railway station, intelligent traffic signals in cities, bus priority measures, and active travel improvements.

The award for outstanding engineering achievement is the second major award for Metro Flow within two months as at the National Rail Awards it was named the best rail engineering scheme in Britain.

Interim Managing Director at Nexus, Cathy Massarella, said: “We’re absolutely delighted that our Metro Flow project has won a second major railway industry award.

“Winning at last week’s Global Light Rail Awards is yet another well-deserved accolade for what was our biggest-ever major line closure. It’s beaten off some strong competition to be named outstanding engineering achievement.

“It comes just a few weeks after the project was named the best rail engineering scheme in Britain at the National Rail Awards.

“Metro Flow and the new Metro Fleet between them represent an investment of almost £500m to build a better Metro for our customers. I know people want a more frequent and reliable service and projects like Metro Flow represent just one part of the hard work our whole team is doing to get there.”