A Network Rail-led consortium has constructed a full size, newly designed accessible bridge, with fully-operational lifts, to give constructors and clients the chance to "try before they buy" and see for themselves how quickly the modular design can be built.

The bridge has been on display in Kent for around a month, giving hundreds of railway colleagues the chance to use the bridge and properly see its scale.

Called AVA, the accessible bridge is designed to be more attractive for passengers, more reliable and easier to maintain than traditional designs. Built of stainless steel, it's designed to be long-lasting and doesn't need to be painted.

The first of the design to be built on the railway will be in Stowmarket, thanks to Greater Anglia, with the prototype giving a great idea of the scale and ease of use and installation. The modular design and plug-and-play lifts are designed to cut the time needed on site by over half, which is much better for passengers and neighbours.

AVA is part of the TIES Living Lab programme and was created by a consortium of Network Rail, Expedition Engineering, Hawkins\Brown, McNealy Brown, ARX and Walker Construction, with funding from Network Rail Research and Development and Innovate UK. The prototype was constructed by McNealy Brown in their Sittingbourne site.

Network Rail's head of buildings and architecture, Anthony Dewar, said: "You can look at models and drawings but there's nothing like using the lifts, walking the stairs and feeling the scale of the full-size bridge to make you realise how good this design really is. We want to give passengers better journeys and provide a railway that's better value for money, and to do that we need fresh designs like this.


"We want a bridge that is open and light so passengers feel secure, a bridge that looks modern, that makes people feel they're travelling on a modern railway, we want lifts to be more reliable, and our colleagues want a bridge that's easy to maintain, that can be installed more quickly and less disruptively… and also doesn't need painting every 25 years! That's why we have AVA."

Marek Dowejko, Greater Anglia's Asset Programme Manager, said: "The station received funding in 2019 for accessibility improvements under the Government's Access for All scheme as the only step-free way to cross the platforms currently is via the level crossing.

"Thanks to this revolutionary new style of bridge the scheme was affordable, and we have been able to use the Access for All funding efficiently and to the best outcome for passengers. We want everyone to be able to have a good journey with us and the plans for Stowmarket are going to make a big difference to people using the station."

Chris Wise, Senior Director at Expedition, the Lead Designer and structural engineer for the AVA Footbridge, said: "Of all the good things about AVA, to us at Expedition, the most exciting is how AVA signals the future of infrastructure manufacture. AVA demonstrates through its lean design, low carbon form how the industry can evolve: and not just in bridges and lifts. AVA changes the landscape: from customised one-off construction to automated, efficient and industrialised manufacture. Saving the taxpayer money, saving lifetime carbon, manufacturing infrastructure products that are super-fast to build, beautiful to use, optimising the process and the product every single time one is made. "

Designed by ARX, the company behind the movable roofs at Wimbledon, the lifts are designed to be easier to install than traditional designs and provide built-in resilience and redundancy, to avoid going out of service.

Darren Falkingham from ARX said: "A footbridge with lifts is vital for persons of reduced mobility, but only any good while the lifts are working. When a lift goes out of service, that's more than an inconvenience – it's enough to stop people from travelling altogether. We applied our knowledge of safe and reliable moving structures to engineer a lift with a strong, curved stainless steel door and two drive motors per lift. And for rapid installation, the plug-and-play design is fully tested and certified at our factory, with a complete lift module delivered to the station platform. In fact, when the prototype was built, the lift was operational in just five hours of arriving at site, start to finish."

Phil Webb from Walker Construction said: "A good design can be enough to make you feel good about your journey, to make you feel safe and welcomed, but a great design will do all that and be easy to install, cheap to maintain, and have the reliability to give people the certainty they can make their journeys hassle-free. We're so proud to see AVA standing tall and showing how good a bridge can be."

The AVA bridge will join other new designs, such as the Beacon and the Flow bridge in the Network Rail design standards catalogue for constructors. The first Beacon bridge was recently opened in Garforth not far from Leeds, with lifts set to join it shortly.

The Stowmarket AVA is set to be opened next year (2025).