NE1
NE1 was held in July 2007 and brought 1500 young people from all over the UK to Herrington Country Park near Sunderland. During the week, they took part in a whole host of community activities at over 45 churches across the North East of England with a final celebration evening on the Friday evening.
The location
Herrington Country Park is a fabulous location for this event, but presented enormous transport problems, with only one entrance/exit and no suitable place for the 35 coaches necessary each day to take the groups out into the community.
The site solution
Working from scratch, the first task was to develop a suitable site traffic plan. Because the site has a single entrance/exit it was paramount to keep this free for access by the emergency services, but also the public who had access to part of the park throughout the event. This site management plan was vital to get the approval for the event from the local Safety Advisory Group.
The site access road, which was the only safe place to load coaches – here are passengers waiting
The logistics of moving over 100 groups to churches all over the North East was particularly challenging, made more difficult because there is no pick up point big enough for all the coaches to pick up together. The first part of the solution was to plan putting together the 100 groups located adjacent to each other to ensuring the coaches were fully utilized. Because of the restricted nature of the site, the maximum number of coache that could pick up at any one time was seven. The best location was on the entrance road, which was fenced off to create seven bus stops, which had unique letters. Coaches waiting for passengers, showing the fenced off area and stewards The coaches were brought together at a local industrial estate, where stewards put them into pick up order of 1 to 7 and then dispatched them to the site to load. They could then prepare the next wave in order. The passengers were provided with instructions was to which bus stop to attend along with the time and each bus was identified. Coaches loading and waiting to leave, before the next wave arrive Having dispatched the coaches from Herrington Country Park, each group was dropped off, some moved for their lunch and attended different locations within the community they served. On the final evening, all the churches from the community were brought into Herrington Country park for a final celebration. This took 45 coaches, who all arrived on site in good time. We were lucky that the weather was good enough to use a large onsite field that would hold all the coaches in two long lines. Stewarding was supplied to ensure that the coaches and pedestrians didn’t converge into the same area. All the coaches were sourced from local companies, who were selected for the quality and attention to detail. This was a must on such a complicated job.
Conclusion
A total of 1650 separate movements were performed throughout the week with only one slight hitch, when a driver forget which day of the week it was.
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