DIRFT III

Royal Mail appointed the Buckingham Group Contracting to deliver a major design and build of their Midlands hub, at the Daventry International Rail Freight Terminal (DIRFT). Billington Structures supplied, fabricated and erected over 4,000 tonnes of structural steelwork including metal decking for this project.

The DIRFT project includes a 4 span portal frame with internal office, multi storey car park, rail canopy and training facility. DIRFT is a rail-road intermodal freight terminal. It was originally a 300 acre development but it was extended twice with other distribution centres, including one for the supermarket Tesco. DIRFT III was the second large rail extension on the site of the former Rugy radio station.

The hub will provide Royal Mail with a BREEAM Excellent and Planet Mark accredited National Distribution Centre totalling 840,000 square feet in the heart of Rugby. It will incorporate a single storey warehouse unit, multi storey car park, three storey offices, vehicle servicing unit, and rail siding/platform.

The warehouse will include a specialist automation system, which will play a pivotal role in automating parts of the mail sorting process. Once operations the national distribution centre will allow Royal Mail to process in the order of a million parcels a day. This will deliver on Royal Mail’s sustainability commitments to community investment, delivering long last benefits for stakeholders, and delivering a cleaner future. DIRFT is located close to a number of major motorways making it ideally suited to distribute parcels nationwide.

A number of steps are being taken to minimise the environmental impact during construction. This includes construction traffic, materials and waste to minimise potential disruption to the wider DIRFT Trading Estate.

A part of the project, Billington Structures will install curved roof trusses to the amenities hub and install a large trussed link bridge between the multi storey car park and the main warehouse.