The Railway Children 2010

Set in the former Eurostar terminal at Waterloo station, the York Theatre Royal production of The Railway Children required a 45m long theatre to straddle tracks and platforms plus house 1000 people and a genuine 66 tonne steam train.

The station’s glass roof, not designed to take heavy loads, needed to support 450m of truss weighing 5 tonnes, with an additional 2.5 tonnes of lighting equipment and one tonne of sound equipment. Unusual’s Design Engineer, Jeremy Featherstone, worked in close conjunction with railway engineers to design a solution to the limited weight loading capabilities of the roof and still meet site regulations.

Forty chain hoists were used to raise the theatre’s main roof structure to a height of nine metres at the centre, sloping to five metres at the sides. 12 truss legs were then installed to relieve some of the load from the roof, before the chain hoists were removed and the lighting and sound equipment installed.

The whole structure was covered with 1250sqm of drapes to form the ceiling, sides, doors and train tunnel and complete the enclosed theatre space.

Unusual also supplied the plant for the load-in for all production departments: two cherry pickers, three 2-ton forklift trucks and two Bradshaw tractor units and trailers carried every piece of the installation a distance of over ¼ mile from the loading dock to the platforms.

The Railway Children was produced by Jenny King and Matthew Gale for the Touring Consortium in association with the National Railway Museum.